Making Space for Queer-Identifying Religious Youth, 1st ed. 2017

Making Space for Queer-Identifying Religious Youth charts young people's understanding of religion, investigating the experiences, choices and identities of queer - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender - youth involved in inclusive churches. Rather than assume that sexuality and religion, and in this case Christianity, are separate and divergent paths, this book explores how they might mutually and complexly construct one another in times of religious-sexual citizenship. Taylor presents a methodological discussion on the 'public sociology' of religion and sexuality studies, and provides an illustrative focus on substantive fields often separated in disciplinary dis-orientations. These examples illustrate how participation shapes identifications; how marginalization and discrimination are managed; and how religion and sexuality serve as vehicles for various forms of belonging, identification and expression. 'Religion' and 'sexuality' are mutually constructed through gendered spaces, online spaces, and sensory spaces.

Introduction: Queer Religious Youth in Colliding Contexts
1. Contradictory Subjectivities? The Space of Research and Researcher-Researched Identities
2. Making Space at the (Queer) Academic Table?
3. Creative Scenes: Sounding Religious, Sounding Queer
4. Online Settings: Becoming and Believing
5. Making space for young lesbians? Gendered sites, scripts and sticking points
6. Policy Spaces and Public imaginations

Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde, UK and was previously Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University, UK. She was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Rutgers University, USA and has held visiting posts including at the Australian National University and McGill University, Canada. Her previous publications include Fitting Into Place?: Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (2012).