Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice”: Indexical Disjuncture in the Talk of LGBT Members of the Progressive Muslim Community

This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, voice, ideological disjuncture, and resistance. Through analysis of individual and group conversations alongside ethnographic observations, I argue that LGBT Muslims and allies strategically index queerness and Muslimness as a challenge to marginalizing discourses and to create ‘safe’ spaces that also benefit other Muslims on the margins. Narratives of both LGBT Muslim marginalization and its strategic disruption as well as nonconformist group interactions are used to illustrate how the queering of Muslim discourse creates “indexical disjuncture” to make space for both LGBT Muslims and other nonconformist Muslims. I conclude by considering how providing evidence of language’s role in the process of ‘queering’ contributes to ongoing conversations in queer theory.