Voices of Resistance and Agency: LBTQ Muslim Women Living Out Intersectional Lives in North America.

This qualitative study critically examined, from an interpretive perspective, 14 life stories of LBTQ Muslim women across North America. This paper explored how LBTQ Muslim women navigated Muslim and LGBTQ hegemonic norms and exclusions as they negotiated and lived out identity intersections. Transnational and critical race feminisms, intersectionality, and critical Islamic liberationist approaches to gender and sexuality framed the project. The study findings suggested that LBTQ Muslim women resisted hegemonic norms by mapping out alternative paths grounded in Islam, and in living out lives in LGBTQ communities. Participants discussed their experiences of being "othered" within LGBTQ communities, how they challenged the notion of a monolithic Islam, how they expanded coming-out frameworks to include their own experiences, as well as how they asserted their own religious agency and resistance. Participants demonstrated that living out an intersectional identity was a complex task where constant negotiations of positionality were transpiring concurrently.