Music as a Wellbeing Infrastructure for Queer Religious Youth

Youth wellbeing has become a keyword in contemporary media discourses, public policy, and academic scholarship in response to the growing prevalence of mental health difficulties among young people. Young people who are both queer and religious face particular challenges to their sense of wellbeing, often navigating particularly complex scenes of identity and belonging. Through photovoice interviews, this study has explored some of the wellbeing strategies and sustaining practices of those who navigate intersections of faith, queerness, and youth. Music holds a particular salience across studies and cultures of youth, queerness, and religion as a vector for experiences of euphoria, ritual, community, self-expression, solidarity, rebellion, and worship. In our data, music figures as a sustaining practice that generates ordinary wellbeing on an affective level and opens up future possibilities. By facilitating relaxation, hope, sense-making, and community, music is a resource for this cohort that sustains life in the present and sustains imaginations for living otherwise in the future. This article uses affect theory to understand the way that music is a material resource available to young, queer, religious bodies as a force that increases their potential and capacity to act.