Collaging LGBTQ+ Lives Online across Religious and Cultural Difference

Religion and sex are subjects about which people feel emotional and passionate, uncomfortable and unsettled. Life after death, spirits, ghosts, passion, desire, love - the many forms in which these subjects come into our worlds- create excitement. Our research on queer youth in religious communities is designed to understand young people’s entanglements of religion and sexuality: areas of passionate attachment. Our approach has been designed from the perspective of affect: feelings and acts of being moved are at the centre of how we work. As a method, affect allows for the exploration of how feelings from knowledges, actions, interactions, and contexts, impact a young person’s capacity to act. We employ affective digital ethnography to map entanglements of emotion, desire, faith, and feeling, in young lives and catalogue the practices of care and of judgement developed by religious youth. The research embodies an ethical research praxis, allowing for a becoming-with the affective nature of the project. This paper presents new empirical research from our Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project on young people, sexuality and religion. We focus on the visual data collected in interviews and will explore how the methods work in terms of generating data and supporting participants in exploring quite complex and personal subjects in productive ways.