Queer as intersectionality: Theorizing gay Muslim identities. Sociology 44(5): 944–961

I begin by identifying characterizations of Muslim identities as antithetical to a wide range of western values, including democracy, secularization, gender equality and sexual diversity. I argue that issues of gender and sexuality represent a problematic around modernity and its values but one that is more complex than the putative clash of civilizations discourse. I suggest that gay Muslims represent an intersectional location that productively illuminates this problematic, because their existence chal-lenges the positioning of western and eastern cultures as mutually exclusive and oppositional. I then theorize this intersectionality using queer theory, arguing that there is an affinity between the queer emphasis on deferred ontology and inter-sectional emphasis on standpoint, suggesting an understanding of intersectionality as productively queer, and queer as necessarily intersectional. In conclusion I sketch out the implications of such theorizing for research on gay Muslim identities