Toward a Decolonial Muslim Queerness: Feminine Queer Men,Hegemonic Masculinity,and Islamic Tradition(s)

Abstract

Informed by extensive fieldwork within Hawzas in Lebanon – traditional Shia institution training scholars and Imams – this paper thinks alongside three feminine queer Muslim cis men within this Islamic space. Focusing on the body, emotionality, and sexuality, the analysis explores how they experience the Hawza legitimizing and enabling key aspects of their feminine queer dwelling. Crucially, they do not articulate this queer enablement and the entwined negotiation of hegemonic masculinities through Eurocentric modernity and liberal progressivism but through specific constructions of ‘Islamic tradition’. By exploring these queer lives within Muslim-majority and ‘traditional’ Islamic spaces, the paper accordingly complicates homocolonialist discourses of a flat incommensurability between (any) Islam and queerness and positions queer Muslim lives as possible beyond Western-centric paradigms inviting the development of a project for a ‘decolonial Muslim queer’ to be (re)made.