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Queer Spiritual Spaces

Queer Spiritual Spaces. QSS Project Overview. April 2008- April 2009 6 case studies Focus groups + interviews, action research 3 co-investigators, 4 postdoctoral fellows, and 1 postgraduate, 1 RA Outcomes: 1 co-authored monograph, website, virtual conference. Research Team.

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Queer Spiritual Spaces

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  1. Queer Spiritual Spaces

  2. QSS Project Overview • April 2008- April 2009 • 6 case studies • Focus groups + interviews, action research • 3 co-investigators, 4 postdoctoral fellows, and 1 postgraduate, 1 RA • Outcomes: 1 co-authored monograph, website, virtual conference

  3. Research Team • Associate Professor Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, Sociology, University of Nottingham • Dr Kath Browne, Geography, University of Brighton • Professor Sally R Munt (P.I.) Cultural Studies, University of Sussex

  4. Research Team cont.Drs. Heather White, Sharon Smith, Liz Dinnie, Amna Khalid and Patrick James History, Anthropology, Medical Sociology, Religious Studies and Digital Media

  5. Case Studies • Findhorn community (‘New Age’)* • Michigan Womens’ Festival (goddess/Gaia)* • Queer Buddhists* • Queer Muslims • Quakers • The ‘non-aligned spiritually curious’ on/off-line* * Denotes ‘new spiritualities’

  6. Context Debates upon marriage and civil partnership legislation for same sex couples in both places have raised the profile of religious approaches to homosexuality. LGBTQ peoples who wish to affirm both their sexual/gender identities and their membership of a faith/spiritual community, are faced with articulating their relationship to the faith mainstream. LGBTQ relationships to spirituality and spiritual space are complex because homosexuality and gender 'deviance' have been both historically and contemporaneously subject to punitive sanction within many majoritarian religious contexts.

  7. Queer Contexts of The ‘Secular Turn’ • secularization of society in the ‘post-Christian’ West has directly affected LGBTQI communities • LGBTQI growth of interest in the sacred via non-traditional religious experience • widespread investment in ‘self’; ideologies of personal growth and therapeutic discourse • key desires of having a (predominantly non-normative) ‘safe space’ in which to achieve that • historical and cultural importance of spirituality to sexual identity movements • emergence of LGBTQI identities and communities into the ‘new phase’ after political struggle • now concerned with ‘lifestyle’ ‘experience’ and ‘enrichment’ – dispersed post-disciplinary subjectivities enacting practises of adaptation and ‘self-improvement’

  8. LGBTQI spiritual spaces LGBTQI peoples in Britain and the United States who wish to affirm both their sexual/gender identities and their membership of a faith/ spiritual community, are faced with a question of 'spiritual immanence' - how to relate to and how to create 'spiritual space'?

  9. Queerspiritualspaces.com. • VISIT OUR WEBSITE!

  10. The Sodomitical Sublime The sodomitical sublime, is a symbol of (shameful) desires that cannot be foreclosed, that provoke mystery, that can evoke a musical resonance in oneself for stretching out what is possible to endure, and perhaps, enjoy.

  11. After the Fall: Queer Heterotopias? The shrimp and the shrimp-goby

  12. QSS summary of findings • Throughout the case studies - what we have variously termed the ‘sacred ordinary’, ‘ordinary spiritualities’ and ‘ordinary transcendence’ - has been key. • We found that spirituality was not distanced or separate from, but an integral part of everyday lives of LGBTQI people’ spatial and temporal habitus. • This contrasted starkly with the representational ‘homosexual other’ of religious identities where the person is only associated with deviance.

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