“We Are God’s Children, Y’all”: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Lesbian- and Gay-Affirming Congregations

“Oh My God, I Sound Like a Horrible Person”: Generic Processes in the Conditional Acceptance of Sexual and Gender Diversity

“…Strategies of this type of nuanced boundary maintenance are what we outline in this study. Rather than withholding morality from sexual and gender minorities, our respondents suggest such people may be moral under certain conditions (McQueeney ). Likewise, instead of banning gender and sexual minorities from America, God's world, or places of worship, such people are admitted if they conform to other norms (Moon ).…”

“…By characterizing equality as something that should exist, but not something they were responsible for creating, for example, they both expressed symbolic support for minorities and avoided effort that might change such conditions in a concrete way (Collins ). Similarly, their promotion of both essential or immutable sexual and gender statuses and notions of sexual and gender choice reproduced rhetoric (Moon ) used to allow some LG people into mainstream social institutions while maintaining their subordination to heterosexual norms (McQueeney ). Whereas researchers have begun examining shifting religious and nonreligious depictions and reactions to homosexuality in recent years (Cragun and Sumerau ), these findings reveal that such shifts may not necessarily lead to equality.…”

“…As a result, many people experience contemporary social life (like the cisgender, heterosexual, Christian women we interviewed) without knowing whether explicitly homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic statements will be interpreted in positive or negative ways. Within this context, the ability to appear at least tolerant of sexual and gender diversity becomes important for maintaining both a positive view of one's self and the affirmation of unfamiliar others (McQueeney ). To manage this dilemma, people may engage in strategies of conditional acceptance.…”

Reframing health and illness: a collaborative autoethnography on the experience of health and illness transformations in the life course

“…As suggested in countless studies focused on the emotional – and broader health – benefits of supportive social communities (Cragun et al . ) and the numerous findings concerning the ways people seek group affirmation and connection in response to managing emotions (Wilkins ) and marginalised statuses (McQueeney ), emotional flourishes accompanying a reframing of one's health and illness may be both overwhelming and a push towards support capable of easing difficult circumstances in illness management. As with cognitive adjustments illustrated in the first author's case, the impact of emotion in health and illness transformations offers fertile ground for systematic analyses and theorising, which might aid in‐depth understanding of the ways people feel health and illness throughout their lives.…”

Learning from the Religious Experiences of Bi+ Trans People

“…Studies also suggest the vast majority of conservative religions have more patriarchal, hierarchical conceptions of gender dating back at least to transformations in the 1800s (Burke ; Sumerau and Cragun ). Further, such scholarship reveals religious people may (consciously and unconsciously) conform to, reject, and/or partially conform and partially reject the official gender norms of their faith in a wide variety of ways (Bartkowski and Read ; Gerber ; Sumerau ), and that such official gender norms change over time (McQueeney ; Robinson and Spivey ; Sumerau and Cragun ). Rather than clean‐cut relationships, the combination of these insights reveal complex ways people do gender as part of doing religion in a wide variety of settings and forms (Avishai ).…”