'Is It Meaningful to Speak of "Queer Spirituality”? An Examination of Queer and LGBT Imagery and Themes in Contemporary Paganism and Christianity’, in Stephen Hunt (ed.), Contemporary Christianity and LGBT Christianities, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 139–56

Is there a distinctly queer spirituality? The term ‘queer’ has been defined in a variety of ways - as ‘resisting normativity’ and as a verb meaning ‘to spoil or interfere’, and as a tool for liberation (Goss 1999, 45-6). Irshad Manji (Summerskill 2006, 62) defines queer as ’being unpredictable’, rather than ‘rigid and absolute, and frankly dull’. Queemess is a metacategory which includes various non-normative sexual identities. ‘Queer’ is also a very different term from ‘gay’. Being gay or lesbian has meant fitting into a specific identity:

Gay identity can be as confining as ‘closetedness’ in its minoritization and elision of the social-cultural differences of same-sex desire. (Goss 1999, 45)

The concept of queer defies categorisation and resists normativity: it is often understood as critically non-heterosexual, transgressive of all heteronormativities and, I would add, gay normativities. ‘Queer’ turns upside down, inside out, and defies heteronormative and gay normative theologies (Goss 1999, 45).