Asking the question “Where are queer spiritual spaces and what happens in them?” this edited collection discusses the findings of an extensive research project that interviewed around 150 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people involved in several religious/spiritual traditions. In Chapter 1, Sally Munt clarifies the project's central analytic: drawing on spatial theory, cultural geography, and performativity, “queer spiritual space” understands space as dynamic, produced, contested, and temporal and examines how LGBTQI people both shape and are shaped by the spiritual spaces they inhabit. The following seven chapters, authored and coauthored by researchers working across a range of disciplines, explore how spiritual, sexual, and gender identities are continually negotiated across institutional and noninstitutional traditions, such as the predominantly Christian Quakers, Buddhists, and Muslims, and “place‐based” faith activities and groups, such as the New Age community in Findhorn, Scotland, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in the United States, and online Internet spiritual communities. Kath Browne's conclusion highlights the main themes of the text: the difficulty of naming both sexual/gender identifications and spiritual experiences, reoccurring attempts to differentiate between normatively acceptable and unacceptable queer identity, the ways in which queers are deeply engaged with both marginal spiritualities and “dominant” pubic religiosity, and the importance of including religious and spiritual life in theorizing the spatial production of sexual and gender identity. Although its stylistic metaphors are labored, the text's diverse case studies and its theoretical commitment to tracking both difference and similarity across them result in a valuable collection for the fields of sexuality and religion, and queer studies.
