Table Of ContentIntersecting Religion and Sexuality
Religion and the Social Order
An Official Publication of the
Association for the Sociology of Religion
General Editor
Inger Furseth (University of Oslo, Norway)
Editorial Committee
Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Michele Dillon (University of New Hampshire, USA)
David Herbert (Kingston University London, UK)
Juan Marco Vaggione (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)
Rhys Williams (Loyola University, Chicago, USA)
Melissa M. Wilcox (University of California at Riverside, USA)
volume 27
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ reso
Intersecting Religion
and Sexuality
Sociological Perspectives
Edited by
Sarah- Jane Page and Andrew Kam- Tuck Yip
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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issn 1061-5 210
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-3 7247-4 (hardback)
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Copyright 2021 by Sarah- Jane Page and Andrew Kam- Tuck Yip. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,
The Netherlands.
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
1 Intersecting Religion and Sexuality: Contributing to an Unfinished
Conversation 1
Sarah- Jane Page and Andrew Kam- Tuck Yip
2 Ethnicity, Gender and Class in the Experiences of Gay Muslims 23
Shanon Shah
3 ‘Agree to Disagree’: An Analysis of the Narrative of a Young Indonesian
Gay Christian through the Lens of Intersectional and Poststructuralist
Feminism 45
Teguh Wijaya Mulya
4 Gender Fluidity, Sexuality and Religion 66
Pamela Dickey Young and Heather Shipley
5 Anglican Disputes over Sexuality in the Intersection of Global Power
Relations: Accounts from African Church Leaders 85
Andrew McKinnon and Christopher Brittain
6 Practising Purity: How Single Evangelical Women Negotiate
Sexuality 103
Katie Gaddini
7 Geographical Mobility, Sexual Identities and Personal
Stories: Complexities of lgbt Christians’ Activism in Poland 122
Dorota Hall
8 Exploring the Intersection of Bisexual and Christian Identities: The
Negotiation of Gendered Attraction in Intimate Lives 145
Alex Toft
9 Contraceptive Use by Young Unmarried Mothers in Nigeria: An
Intersectional Analysis 168
George Okechukwu Amakor
vi Contents
10 ‘Our Lives from a Different Perspective’: How Chinese and Taiwanese
Gay and Lesbian Individuals and Their Parents Navigate Confucian
Beliefs 190
Emmanuele Lazzara
11 Crosses and Crossroads: American Conservative Christianity’s Anti-
Intersectionality Discourse and the Erasure of lgbtq+ Believers 212
Rebecca Barrett- Fox and Andrew Kam- Tuck Yip
12 Navigating Religion, Sexuality and Illness: Ellie’s Story 228
Sarah- Jane Page and Andrew Kam- Tuck Yip
Index 249
Notes on Contributors
George Okechukwu Amakor
is currently a Health and Social Care/S ociology lecturer at Sandwell College,
West Bromwich, West Midlands, UK. He completed his PhD in Sociology at As-
ton University, Birmingham UK in November 2018. His research looked at the
experiences of young unmarried mothers and the attitudes of church members
towards unmarried teenage pregnancy in Nigeria. His research interests are in
unmarried young parents, teenage pregnancy, religion, families, sexualities,
gender and feminism. He is also currently contributing to another edited col-
lection entitled Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexualities (Routledge, 2020).
Rebecca Barrett- Fox
is a scholar of religion, sexuality, and politics, with a focus on conservative
Christian movements in the US. The author of God Hates: Westboro Baptist
Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (University of Kansas,
2016) as well as numerous scholarly and popular articles and book chapters
on hate and anti- gay activism in American Protestantism, she frequently con-
sults with groups and communities, with a focus on religious groups seeking
to deepen their understanding of their role in perpetuating oppression. She is
professor of sociology at Arkansas State University and can be found online at
https:// anygoodthing.com/ .
Christopher Craig Brittain
is Dean of Divinity and the Margaret E. Fleck Chair in Anglican Studies at Trin-
ity College in the University of Toronto. His research focuses on relations with-
in the global Anglican Communion, theological responses to disaster and ter-
rorism, and the writings of the early Frankfurt School on religion and theology.
Recent publications include: The Anglican Communion at a Crossroads: The
Crisis of a Global Church (with Andrew McKinnon, Penn State University Press,
2018) and “Racketeering in Religion: Adorno and Evangelical Support for Don-
ald Trump”, Critical Research on Religion 6.3 (2018).
Pamela Dickey Young
is Professor, School of Religion, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. Her re-
search concerns the intersections of religion, sex, gender and public policy.
Publications include (with Heather Shipley) Identities Under Construction: Re-
ligion, Gender and Sexuality Among Youth in Canada (McGill- Queen’s Univer-
sity Press, 2020); Religion, Sex and Politics: Christian Churches and Same- Sex
viii Notes on Contributors
Marriage in Canada (Fernwood, 2012); Women and Religious Traditions (3rd
edition), edited with Leona Anderson (Oxford University Press, 2015); “Infor-
mal Sex Education: Forces that Shape Youth Identities and Practices”, in Criti-
cal Pedagogy, Sexuality Education and Young People, eds. Andrew Yip and Fida
Sanjakdar (Peter Lang, 2018).
Katie Gaddini
is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Social Research Institute at University Col-
lege London. She is an affiliated researcher at the University of Johannesburg
and the University of Cambridge, departments of Sociology. Her research is
centred at the juncture between gender, religion and politics. Her monograph,
tentatively titled The Cost of Staying: Women in Evangelical Christianity is forth-
coming with Columbia University Press.
Dorota Hall
is a cultural anthropologist and sociologist, Associate Professor at the Insti-
tute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and President of
the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association
(isorecea). She has studied religion and sexualities in Poland since 2011. In
2016, she published a book Searching for a Place: lgbt Christians in Poland (in
Polish). She has also published in English in various academic journals and
edited volumes. She combines her academic activity with the engagement in
policy- oriented expert networks, e.g. the franet network established by the
EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.
Emmanuele Lazzara
holds an MA in Contemporary Chinese Studies & Research Methods and a PhD
in Sociology from the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests en-
compass gender and sexuality, sexual discrimination, sexual identity politics,
Confucianism, and the interplay between religious and sexual identity. He is
currently lecturer at Shanghai International Studies University.
Andrew McKinnon
is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. His longstanding
areas of interest are sociological theory and the sociology of religion. His work
on theory lies mostly at the intersection of social science and rhetoric; most
of his recent preoccupations in the sociology of religion involves the study of
conflict within Anglicanism worldwide. A methodological jack- of- all- trades
(master- of- none taken as read) he has published quantitative, qualitative
and historical research. With Christopher Brittain, he has recently published
Notes on Contributors ix
Anglican Communion at a Crossroads: The Crises of a Global Church (Penn State
University Press, 2018).
Sarah- Jane Page
is Senior Lecturer and sociologist of religion based at Aston University, Bir-
mingham, UK. Her research is centred upon the relationship between religion,
gender and sexuality, utilising feminist approaches. She has worked on pro-
jects examining youth sexualities, clergy motherhood in the Church of Eng-
land, clergy husbands, qualitative attitudes to gender and sexuality issues,
anti- abortion activism, and Roman Catholic attitudes to abortion. She has
co- published three books: Religious and Sexual Identities (Routledge, 2013),
Understanding Young Buddhists (Brill, 2017) – both co- authored with Andrew
Kam- Tuck Yip – and Religion and Sexualities (Routledge, 2020) with Heather
Shipley. She has also published widely in various edited collections and aca-
demic journals.
Shanon Shah
is a London- based sociologist of religion and author of the monograph The
Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia and Britain
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He has lectured in religious studies at King’s Col-
lege London, the University of Kent and the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He is
also an editor at Critical Muslim (Hurst), the flagship publication of the Muslim
Institute, a London- based educational fellowship.
Heather Shipley
is Project Manager for the Nonreligion in a Complex Future sshrc Partnership
Grant, led by Lori Beaman (uOttawa). Her research focuses the construction,
management and regulation of religion, gender, sexuality and sexual orienta-
tion as identity categories in media, legal and public discourse. Publications
include: Identities Under Construction: Religion, Gender and Sexuality among
Youth in Canada (2020), co- authored with Pamela Dickey Young, McGill-
Queen’s University Press; “Sites of Resistance: lgbtqi+ Experiences at Trinity
Western University”, Canadian Journal of Law and Society (2019); and Young
People and the Diversity of (Non)Religious Identities in International Perspective
(2019), co- edited with Elisabeth Arweck, Springer.
Alex Toft
is a Research Fellow in the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and
Families at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses upon sexuality,
gender, disability, spirituality and identity theory. His work includes Bisexuality
