‘Spirited Closets’

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

Abstract

Does celibacy divest or invest one with agency? In this paper, the Malaysian-based lesbian and gay narratives, analysed using Sara Ahmed’s ‘queer phenomenology’, avoid neat answers to this question and point instead to the ambivalence inherent in one’s adoption of or attempt in doing celibacy. Based on the complex ways in which celibacy is understood and practised by interviewees in this study, the narratives (generated by in-depth interviews) privileged in this paper show how becoming celibate or doing celibacy: is equated with the most extreme form of suppressing sexual desire (lesbian Christian missionary), is equated with abstinence from sexual pleasure due to religious observances (gay Buddhist monk and Hindu lesbian mystic), adheres to yet redefines sexual orientation—by destabilizing the (hetero)sexualisation of desire—and unsettles the religious injunction to love the sinner but not the sin (gay Christian). These redefinitions of celibacy potentially offer not only a re-visioning of sexuality in spirituality but also spirituality in sexuality through these embodied narratives of self-realisation through a paradoxical self-denial.

Author

• Sharon A. Bong, Monash University