Creating Muslim Futures: Katrina Thompson's Queer "Discursive Futurism" and the Ethical Labor of Middle-Class Muslim Women in India

Structure and core argument

Katrina Daly Thompson's "Muslims on the Margins" (2023) offers a beautiful ethnographic portrait of how queer and LGBTQ+ Muslims navigate their faith within queer-friendly mosque spaces and online communities across North America from 2016 to 2020. The book's core argument is that these communities use discourse as a powerful tool for social action, creating what Thompson calls a "community of resistance." Thompson argues that queer Muslims engage with their faith by actively participating in Islamic tradition rather than rejecting or abandoning it. Through careful ethnographic analysis, Thompson re-emphasizes Islam as a lived religion, using conversations and embodied interactions to explore how participants use and position their bodies in relation to one another, how they practice Islam, and how they envision a better future.

The book's structure effectively builds this argument across six chapters. Thompson begins by establishing her analytical framework around "nonconformist" and "marginalized" Muslims, deliberately moving away from the fragmented concept of "progressive" Muslims pervasive in North America. This framework sets the stage for understanding the transnational scope of Muslims who emphasize their marginalization from mainstream spaces. The second chapter explores the emotional landscapes of these communities through storytelling and narrative analysis, revealing how participants form an "affective community" based on shared experiences.

In the third chapter, Thompson introduces her concept of "discursive futurism," showing how these communities not only envision but actively create their future through collaborative practices and embodied interactions in congregational prayers. Chapter four examines how nonconformist Muslim’s "queer" their discourse on Islam, asserting identities that are simultaneously Muslim and queer despite pressures of Muslim homophobia and queer Islamophobia.

The final two chapters address criticisms and self-reflection within these communities, particularly highlighting the transformative demands of Black women religious leaders who push beyond LGBTQ discourse to engage with anti-racist and broader humanitarian justice efforts. By concluding with these critiques, Thompson demonstrates that the move toward building inclusive communities is ongoing and complex, requiring continuous self-reflection and expansion of social justice frameworks.

Key Questions

In my view, Thompson's work raises at least three critical questions at the intersection of feminism and decoloniality: 

1) How does the concept of "discursive futurism" offer a decolonial methodology that challenges Western secular-liberal frameworks for understanding religious agency? In what ways does this framework help us understand how 'Muslims on the margins' create alternative knowledge systems that resist both Islamophobic and patriarchal epistemic violence?

2) To what extent can queer interpretations of Islamic texts be considered continuations of, rather than departures from, Islamic tradition?

3) How do the demands of Black women religious leaders in North America challenge white-centered LGBTQ discourse? What other theoretical frameworks emerge when we consider how differently marginalized Muslim communities navigate the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and colonial histories in their religious practice?

Methodological and Theoretical Contributions

Thompson's positioning as a white Muslim convert and queer cis woman who actively participates in these communities provides a uniquely informed methodological perspective bridging insider/outsider status while maintaining analytical distance. Furthermore, her methodological innovations include shared ethnographic authority, collaborating with interlocutors to co-construct theoretical frameworks that allow community members' critiques to drive theoretical development. This approach aligns with decolonial methodologies disrupting traditional power dynamics in ethnographic research. 

In this book, Thompson's concept of "discursive futurism" represents her major theoretical contribution. She argues that the future is not merely envisioned but is embodied and created in the physical space of congregational prayers, as well as by interacting with others’ bodies and voices in such spaces. By building on Saba Mahmood's (2005) concept of performativity, Thompson shows how these communities cultivate inclusivity and gender expansiveness through intercorporeal practices. In that, she offers readers a chance to “feel futurity” by examining how non-conformists co-created inclusive spaces that transcended gender barriers, thus, in a way, unlearning the old ways and absorbing the new. 

Advancing the Field and Informing Research

Thompson's work significantly advances the anthropology of Islam and queer religious studies by demonstrating how marginalized Muslims actively participate in shaping Islamic tradition rather than being passive recipients or rejectors of it. The book challenges the persistent dichotomy in public discourse that positions Islam and queerness as incompatible by documenting the lived realities of communities that embody both identities. For scholars within anthropology of religion, Thompson's focus on "affective community" provides a valuable framework to understand how emotional connections sustain religious communities and offers alternatives to overly intellectualized approaches to religious studies.

In particular, Thompson's theorization of "discursive futurism" offers a generative analytical framework for my ethnographic inquiry into the ethical aspirations of "behtar zindagi" (good life) among middle-class pious Muslim women in North India. My doctoral work interrogates the interstices between divine determination (qadr/kismat) and agentive potentialities through what I conceptualize as a triadic constellation of ethical labor: mushaqqat (ethics of struggle), sabr (ethics of patience), and khidmat (ethics of care). Thompson's nuanced articulation of how marginalized communities actively instantiate futures through discursive practices and embodied engagements, rather than merely projecting them as abstract potentialities, provides theoretical resonance with my ethnographic material in Bihar and Delhi, India.

While Thompson's ethnographic focus centers on queer Muslims cultivating inclusive devotional spaces within the North American context, my work examines how Muslim women in India navigate and reconfigure normative ethics of social mobility. They do so by transcending hegemonic frameworks predicated solely on quantifiable metrics of educational attainment and economic advancement. Analogous to how Thompson's interlocutors mobilize "discursive futurism" to constitute communities of resistance, women in my ethnography deploy forms of ethical labor to transform what Alice Elliot and Laura Menin (2018) theorize as the "malleable fixity" of destiny into inhabitable presents and aspirational horizons. Both scholarly interventions illuminate the ways in which differentially marginalized Muslim subjects deploy quotidian practices and discursive strategies to materialize alternative ontological possibilities within structurally constrained conditions of existence. In conclusion, in the current geopolitical climate, where both Muslims and LGBTQ+ individuals face increasing marginalization, Thompson's work stands as an essential contribution that documents the resilience and creativity of communities at this intersection.