Sacred Symbiosis: Negotiations of Desire and Spirit among Non-Heteronormative Malaysian Men

• In Event: Queering ‘Spirit’ in the Real and the Reel: Vignettes of Hope, Agency and Empowerment from Malaysia and Indonesia

Abstract

The sexual identifyings and expressions of non-heteronormative men in Malaysia are often disparaged as ‘sinful’ and devoid of the values of their institutional faith systems. Nonetheless, some non-heteronormative men who detect spiritual interventions in their lived realities as sexual subjects negotiate and rearrange their sexual desire and spirit—or sense of the sacred—in symbiotic ways. By adopting a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology, and drawing on perspectives of queer spirituality (Sweasey, 1997; Browne, 2010) for theoretical enrichment, this paper aims to be a queer spiritual project that draws on, analyses and theorises the selected narratives of three non-heteronormative Malaysian men with various religious affiliations and spiritual inclinations. By re-imagining and re-performing desire and spirit in diverse ways, these men conceptualise desire and spirit in symbiotic relationship to each other as: (i) sexual self-respect; (ii) indicative of divine omniscience; and (iii) participation in divine love.

Author

• Joseph N. Goh, Monash University