Conflicting identities? A study on the Intersectionality of Homosexuality, Islam and migration in Flanders and Brussels.

‘Unlocking the Closet – Same-Sex Desire among Muslim Men and Women in Belgium’ focuses on the intersections of same-sex sexualities, transnationalism and religion. The author interviewed lesbians, gays and bisexuals from Muslim backgrounds and focused on two different groups: sexual migrants and people from second and third generation migrant backgrounds. The Ph.D project used several research methods: ethnographic interviewing and online asynchronous interviewing or e-mail interviewing. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, participant observation was limited to the activities of LGBTQ associations and the LGBTQ scene in general in Hasselt, Antwerp and Brussels, three cities with a queer scene. Additionally, the study used solicited diaries: although I asked my interlocutors to reflect on sexuality and religion in their everyday lives, they had the freedom to add whatever they wanted to share. Since women are often conspicuously underrepresented in LGBT research, there was a great deal of extra effort to include women in the project. As a result of these efforts, 40% of the people I interviewed from the sexual migrant group and 50% of people from second and third generation backgrounds were women.

The aim of the project was threefold. First, in order to question the heteronormativity of migration studies, the study aimed to show that sexuality, structures the processes of migration and people’s motivations to migrate, but also the settlement processes and their transnational relationships. As such, the research project questions how narratives of sexual migration are often presented as movements from oppression to freedom. In the host country, sexual migrants find themselves in reconstituted asymmetries. Secondly, the study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that questions common understandings of ‘gay identity’ and ‘coming out’. LGBT and queer studies have a tendency to focus on white, gay, male, upwardly mobile, urban and secular citizens from a particular country, as these are the people who can most easily be reached by researchers. This fails to take into account that there are other ways of embodying and living transgressive sexualities. Therefore, the author argues against prevailing notions, which tend to universalize and essentialize human experience by assuming the relevance of western categories of sexuality and gender in the lives of people from other parts of the world. Thirdly, religious piety is often viewed as contradictory to same-sex sexuality, thus denying LGBTQ agency. Furthermore, despite a growing interest in LGBTQ religiosity, the existing literature is largely based on the experiences of LGBTQ Christians. The religious beliefs and practices of LGBTs is a research area that remains underdeveloped. Therefore, the project focused on non-heteronormative Muslims and their ritual practices and beliefs.

The project focused on three areas. First, how LGBs from Muslim backgrounds negotiate silence and disclose around their sexuality in everyday life, especially within kin relationships, both in Belgium and transnationally. Drawing on the notion of moral breakdown, the author argues that LGBs from Muslim backgrounds navigate the disjunctures and asymmetries of multiple heteronormative and homonormative institutional moralities and public moral discourses, some of which go across national borders. Therefore, the moment (or series of moments) when one realizes feeling (also) attracted to persons of the same sex, constitutes a particularly strong and influential moment of moral breakdown. In order to develop an alternative understanding of ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’, the author demonstrates how many interlocutors played with locking and unlocking the closet, thus highlighting the importance of both tacit knowledge, on the one hand, and silence as a language, on the other hand.

Focusing on newly-arrived sexual migrants from Muslim backgrounds as they chart their way in the country of arrival, the author reveals the non-linear, complex and multiple transformations of the migrants’ sexual subjectivities, desirous practices and intimate lives. The author argues that the way a migrant gains entry to Belgium heavily informs the modalities through which sexual subjectivity is transformed, foregrounding the role of state institutions, ideologies, norms and practices in this process. The incredible difficulties experienced by asylum seekers are situated at the confluence of differences in cultural frameworks and moralities of gender, sexuality and subjecthood and intersectional dynamics between class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race.

Lastly, the author looks at the conundrum that has plagued his interlocutors and preoccupied researchers on the links between same-sex sexuality and Muslimness, and same-sex sexuality and monotheistic religions more generally: how can one be gay, lesbian or bisexual and Muslim? The research project picks up where other authors left off by investigating how the moral self is constituted. Looking at the moral breakdown caused by the conflict between sexuality and religion, the author shows the insights generated by such moments of moral breakdown in relation to our understanding of moral selves. While some Muslims try to find a theologically-inspired solution to commensurate their faith and sexuality, others do not: they simply are Muslim and queer. The author argues that it would be better to understand moral selves as contradictory, ambiguous, ambivalent and fragmented, instead of coherent, unified, ordered and whole.

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The research project (FWO fellowship) will studylesbian, gay and bisexual Muslims with a migration background in Flanders and
Brussels. The project wishes to contribute ethnographically andtheoretically
to the anthropology of religion, sexuality and migration.

         As
a minority within an ethnic and/or religious minority, the construction,management and performance of identity of non-heterosexual Muslims is
considered to take on specific forms. On the one hand, they have to deal with
heteropatriarchy and homo– or biphobia within their own ethnic and/or religious
community, and, on the other hand, in the contemporary post 9/11-context, they
are confronted with religiophobia, islamophobia and (cultural) racism within
the ethnic majority group and gay community.

         The
main research question of the project is: what intersectional dynamics are at
play in the construction, management and performance of ethno- religious and
sexual identities of LGB Muslims? Ethnographic
fieldwork will be done in the urban setting of Flanders andBrussels. Data
collection will be based on the narrative method.