Leave/Remake: Thinking Ambivalence and the Ethical Alongside Queer Ex-Muslims in Southeast Asia

Through interpretive qualitative methods, this paper thinks alongside the experiences of 15 Southeast Asian queer persons who (differentially) identify as ex-Muslim. Examining the affective and cognitive processes these participants traverse as they articulate their discontent with and movement away from hegemonic forms of Islam, the paper analyses the constituents and formations of this disillusionment. These include, I argue, text-centrism, Arabo-centrism, institutionalization, and legal-centrism as key features of a foreclosed social justice and site of (re)producing violences and woundings. From there, the paper inquires into the role Islam (ceases to) perform in participants’ lived experiences across scales of the epistemic and the everyday particularly focusing on their conceptions of ‘ethics’ and ‘good life’. The paper here identifies a complexity and messiness where a desired haunting of an (alternative, including Indigenous, queer, and animist) Islamic is pursued by participants as they seek to relationally (rather than individualistically) construct their notions and practices of the ethical. Conceptualizing this as a ‘post-Islamic ethics’, I argue for the need to move beyond the Muslim/ex-Muslim as a binary and examine the complex affects that shape and form ambivalent lived experience, particularly in relation to intersectional and entangled social justice issues, of queer (ex)Muslims.