“I don’t want to be the Muslim lesbian idol”: experiences of queer women from Muslim backgrounds in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper explores how four queer women from Muslim backgrounds in Catalonia navigate the intersections of gender, sexuality, and faith, challenging dominant narratives that position Muslim backgrounds and queerness as inherently incompatible. Based on in-depth interviews and using an inductive approach, the study identifies five recurring “knots” in their experiences: self-identification, spiritual exploration, family expectations, cultural dissonance, and queer constellations. These knots represent sites of tension where participants actively negotiate their identities across multiple social contexts, shaped by Islamophobia, lesbophobia, and shifting norms within different communities of belonging. The research highlights their agentic strategies to sustain family ties, navigate spirituality, and create queer affiliations. This study emphasizes the plurality of lived experiences of queer women from Muslim backgrounds and calls for more nuanced, context-sensitive understandings of belonging that resist monolithic or Western-centric framings of queer emancipation.