Creating a Sexual Self in Heteronormative Space: Integrations and Imperatives Amongst Spiritual Seekers at the Findhorn Community

Intersections between religion and sexuality are coming onto social science agendas. However, this has predominantly been in terms of its treatment by mainstream religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, and thus in contexts traditionally hostile to lesbian, gay and bi sexualities (LGB). This article extends this by exploring identities and contestations of sexuality within activities that have variously been described as \'New Age\' or \'spiritual\'. Considering the experiences and interactions of spiritual seekers avoids a non-social conceptualisation of \'New Age\' which views spirituality primarily as an individualistic experience. The specific focus here is the Findhorn Community, a spiritual community and demonstration eco-village in Scotland. We find that seekers\' attempt to resist labelling and categorisation through creating and using individualised sexual (as well as spiritual) expressions. However, tensions stemming from (heteronormative) interactions within the Findhorn community show that sexual diversity and labelling continues to matter. The research demonstrates that sexual fluidity is a privileged position to occupy, but that it is also ultimately unsustainable in that fluid identity becomes re-subsumed in heteronormativity and, eventually, individuals have to come out and identify all over again. The continuing imperative for some LGB people to define themselves as/with \'something\', is thus apparent even within supposedly individualized settings and belief systems. Such positioning questions the individuality that is presumed to define New Age spiritualities, and shows how categories of lesbian, gay and bisexual also continue to be deployed at the same time as they are resisted and reinterpreted.Individuality; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual; Sexuality; Spirituality; Findhorn Community

Senses of Gender

This paper explores the testimony of trans respondents to Count Me In Too (a participatory action research project that examined LGBT lives in Brighton and Hove), and this analysis occasions the development of innovative concepts for thinking about understandings and experiences of trans phenomena and gender. The analysis starts by exploring the diversity of trans identities before considering evidence of how health services pathologise trans experiences. These analyses not only call into question mind/body dualisms within contemporary gender schema, but also challenge the continued reliance on a sex/gender dichotomy – both in public institutions and in academic theorising – making a definitive distinction between transsexualism and transgenderism difficult to sustain. To do justice to the complexity of the respondents\' testimony, we advance the concept of a \'sense of gender\' – a sense that belongs to the body, but that is not the same as its fleshy materiality – as one register in which gender is lived, experienced and felt. This sense of gender becomes expressed in relation to a sense of dissonance (sometimes articulated through the \'wrong body discourse\') among the various elements that compose the body, its sex and its gender, such that the \'body\' experiences an inability to be \'consistent\' in ways that are usually taken for granted. The paper suggests that further work needs to be undertaken to explore how the concept of \'senses of gender\' can be applied to a broader rethinking of the relationship between gender and the body.Trans; Transgender; Transsexual; Sex; Gender; Sense; LGBT; Embodiment; Body; Mental Health

Doing Feminist Research in Contested Moments: Commentary on ‘Gender’s Wider Stakes: Lay Attitudes to Legal Gender Reform’

Commentary on Peel and Newman.&nbsp

Introduction to lesbian geographies

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Introduction – Here versus There: Beyond comparison in queer and sexuality politics

This special issue explores the simplification of common narratives that have developed in the wake of changing sexual and gender politics in the early part of the 21st Century into binarised narratives of a ‘here’ where sexual politics are ‘sorted’ and a ‘there’ which must ‘catch up’. In this introduction, we reflect on the challenges of attending to the historical, material, political and legal forces that give ‘here’ and ‘there’ geopolitical, discursive and geographic coherence, and discuss how the papers in the special issue explore, challenge and contest the dynamics that underpin the construction of ‘Here versus There’

Queer Spiritual Spaces

Drawn from extensive, new and rich empirical research across the UK, Canada and USA, Queer Spiritual Spaces investigates the contemporary socio-cultural practices of belief, by those who have historically been, and continue to be, excluded or derided by mainstream religions and alternative spiritualities. As the first monograph to be directly informed by 'queer' subjectivities whilst dealing with divergent spiritualities on an international scale, this book explores the recently emerging innovative spaces and integrative practices of queer spiritualities. Its breadth of coverage and keen critical engagement mean it will serve as a theoretically fertile, comprehensive entry point for any scholar wishing to explore the queer spiritual spaces of the twenty-first century