Challenging the opposition of LGBT identities and Muslim cultures: initial research on the experiences of LGBT Muslims in Canada

ABSTRACT

Many have described the cultural and political opposition between LGBT rights and identities and Muslim cultures. Rahman (2014) has argued that one important way to challenge this perceived enmity is to produce further knowledge about the experiences and identities of LGBT Muslims because they exist at the intersections of this political opposition and disrupt the assumptions underlying it. Drawing on Rahman’s framework of Muslim LGBT as “LGBT Intersectional Identities”, we provide initial evidence from on-going research into the experiences of LGBT Muslims in Canada, based on six in-depth qualitative interviews. Focusing on the tensions between living an LGBT life and being Muslim, we demonstrate that there are strategies for reconciling the two that undermine assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of Muslim cultures and homosexualities. These strategies both confirm the extant evidence of identity processes for LGBT Muslims and provide some new evidence of the awareness of negotiating Islamophobia, racialization and Muslim homophobia as part of the development of an LGBT Muslim identity, and the need to understand Muslim identity in a broader frame than simply religious. In this sense, the experiences of LGBT Muslims present an LGBT intersectional challenge, both to western assumptions about the coherence of LGBT identity and the coming out process, and to assumptions in Muslim culture that tend to position individuals who identify as LGBT outside of their traditions.