This introduction frames our Special Issue ‘Intersecting Identities: Being Queer and Religious’ within the contemporary intensification of anti-gender politics and its entanglements with religious conservatism, secular progressivism, colonial legacies and state power. In this Special Issue, we seek to examine how queer religious subjects actively inhabit both religion and queerness under conditions of constraint. Drawing on contributions from diverse geographical, religious and social contexts, we highlight how faith, spirituality, ritual, prayer, digital intimacy, place-making and embodied practice can become resources for belonging and resistance. The articles collectively challenge assumptions that religion is necessarily incompatible with LGBTIQ+ life, while also refusing simplistic narratives of inclusion or liberation. Instead, they show how queer religiosity is shaped by intersecting structures of race, migration, caste, class, asylum, sex work, gender, sexuality and institutional authority. Our introduction argues that queer religious lives expose the limits of both religious conservatism and secular frameworks that misrecognize faith-based LGBTIQ+ identities.
Rodríguez et al. (Thu,) studied this question.