Contribution short abstract

I conceptualise longing as a creative, communal force by reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with an ecumenical LGBTQ+ congregation based in Metro Manila, Philippines, where congregants celebrate queer longing and sexuality as mutually inclusive to Christian religiosity.

Contribution long abstract

As part of this roundtable, I conceptualise longing as a creative, communal force by reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with an ecumenical LGBTQ+ congregation based in Metro Manila, Philippines. Congregants’ framing of Jesus Christ as a queer icon and subject of desire is emblematic of various spiritual missions and practices that celebrate queer longing and sexuality as mutually inclusive to Christian religiosity, foregrounding the tenet that God loves them because of their identities as LGBTQ+ people, not in spite of them. Not only does longing here disrupt the oft-conceived nature of the church as elevated and isolated from the messy physicality of being human (and, indeed, queer), it both embraces and transcends antiquated definitions based on bodily desire or unconscious drive; longing can be a resource for affirming faith, for building community, and an agentic subject in its own right. Thus, ‘Queer Jesus’ exemplifies how my interlocutors account for the interplay of multiple, seemingly opposed ideas and influences through and beyond their worship as LGBTQ+ urbanites living amidst the realities of colonially-rooted Christian ideology still embedded within contemporary Filipino national identity and culture. I also discuss the personal impact of this research and its evocation of an embodied empathy that not only infuses my academic work but my own understanding of myself a queer lapsed Catholic, working in tandem with my interlocutors to dispute reductive narratives of ubiquitous queer suffering under religion and homophobic discourses that dismiss queerness as antithetical to Christianity or a Western import and, thus, un-Filipino.