This panel explores ways gay and queer people seek religious community in colonial and neo-colonial contexts, caught between assimilation and building new queer worlds, both in the flesh and online. Freedom appears as a tantalizing reward for those who are able (by virtue of racial and economic privilege) to assimilate, chasing the promises of empire, as well as in building spaces where new forms of life and relationship can be explored.
This paper addresses the ways in which critiques of "gay" and "queer" as products of western colonialism (Massad 2007, Puar 2017) are co-opted by religious nationalist groups to support anti-queer policies under the guise of anti-colonialism. This co-option puts queer activists in a difficult double-bind of having to prove their belonging in the imagined nation even as they have to compete for funding in a homocapitalist global NGO economy (Rao 2020). I show that this double-bind leads some queer activists to reshape not only what it means to be queer but also what it means to belong to a religious community. By choosing when and how to be complicit with competing power structures, these queer activists are able to create room for innovation and inclusion through shifting approaches to identity. However, this instability comes at a cost.
Building off the work of Frantz Fanon and Glen Sean Coulthard, this paper argues that J.D. Vance’s rhetoric of the “normal gay guy” during the 2024 United States Presidential election constitutes a recognition-based strategy of colonization designed to dictate the terms of the relationship between gay men and conservatives in a way that benefits the cisheteropatriarchal status quo. Moreover, this paper will unmask Vance’s rhetorical strategy as an extension of that of his own Church: like Vance’s “normal gay” rhetoric, the Catholic hierarchy’s “same-sex attraction” rhetoric creates a politics of recognition and accommodation that reinforces Catholic colonial aims. As such, in both church and state, politics of recognition rely upon an affirmation of the dominant-subaltern relationship characteristic of colonialism. Genuine liberation for gay men thus requires a fundamental rejection of underlying colonial structures that define the parameters of existing discourse.
Through the Space feature (a live audio conversation), X, formerly known as Twitter, serves as an alternative platform for conversations between openly gay and closeted gay individuals in Indonesia. Amid scapegoating threats and oppression toward LGBTQ individuals, gay Indonesians–using alternate accounts– transform this platform into a gay world. Using Digital Ethnography methods, this paper exposes lived experiences of Indonesian gay individuals on X, where the conversations intersect with interreligious dialogue, sexual health, kinship, and queer identity in Indonesia.