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Article published In: Queering borders: Language, sexuality and migration
Edited by David A.B. Murray
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 3:1] 2014
► pp. 60–86

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“Being gay has been a curse for me”

Gay Muslim Americans, narrative and negotiations of belonging in the Muslim ummah

 | Purchase College, New York, USA
Published online: 10 March 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.3.1.04afz
In this essay, I draw on ethnographic research with South Asian Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston to explore everyday negotiations of religion, race, sexuality and transnationalism. The essay highlights three intersecting registers that situate gay Muslim American sexual cultural formations in local, transnational and cultural contexts. Drawing on participant observation and oral life history interviews, this essay examines: (a) culturally constructed male sexualities that are informed by the scripts, language, and cultural idioms of homo-sociality and same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in the homeland; (b) the increasing centrality of belonging to a transnational Muslim ummah; and (c) the appropriation of western terminologies and categories of sexuality in constructing a gay identity. The narratives examined in this essay contribute to cultural analyses of transnational sexual cultures, and ethnographies of Muslim Americans and LGBTQIA immigrant communities in the West.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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