Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities

I begin by identifying characterizations of Muslim identities as antithetical to a wide range of western values, including democracy, secularization, gender equality and sexual diversity. I argue that issues of gender and sexuality represent a problematic around modernity and its values but one that is more complex than the putative clash of civilizations discourse. I suggest that gay Muslims represent an intersectional location that productively illuminates this problematic, because their existence challenges the positioning of western and eastern cultures as mutually exclusive and oppositional. I then theorize this intersectionality using queer theory, arguing that there is an affinity between the queer emphasis on deferred ontology and intersectional emphasis on standpoint, suggesting an understanding of intersectionality as productively queer, and queer as necessarily intersectional. In conclusion I sketch out the implications of such theorizing for research on gay Muslim identities.