Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel

A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions’ teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that the conflict frame is empirically imprecise and conceptually flawed. I demonstrate fluidity and ambivalence vis-à-vis religiosity and sexual identity and argue that ambivalence is generative: In the process of making sense of their sexual and religious selves, my respondents challenge what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be same-sex attracted, thereby challenging the conflict frame's categorical schema. I then make the case for a more contextualized and dynamic framework for theorizing LGBT negotiations of religious and sexual identities. I also observe that the limitations of the conflict lens are symptomatic of broader tendencies in the sociology of religion to rely on U.S. and Christian cases and a pattern of limited engagement with work in other disciplines and subdisciplines.