Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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How Inclusive Is Inclusive? Religious Discourses And LGBTQIA+ Identities in Brazil
Eduardo (Alves Vieira) he/they
ABSTRACT:
The Inclusive Churches Movement has encouraged inclusivity within religious spaces, advocating for more tolerant discourses and practices toward dissident sexualities and non-hegemonic gender identities. Such a movement has become a hot topic among scholars interested in the intersectional studies of language, gender, sexuality, and religion. Although it has gained momentum elsewhere, the movement has been understudied in Brazil, where many new “LGBTQIA+” inclusive churches emerged in the last decades. This presentation stems from my project titled A double-edged sword: religious discourses and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, in which I draw on Queer Linguistics studies to analyze the online discourse of the Brazilian Contemporary Christian Church (CCC), one of the most LGBTQIA+-friendly churches in the country. The research question guiding this study is how queer-inclusive CCC is. Through thematic and critical discourse analyses, I scrutinize CCC’s discourse present on 1) its website, 2) a series of eight videos available on the church’s YouTube channel, and 3) its related comment sections. Results show that although CCC’s general discourse emphasizes a welcoming and accepting approach toward sexual and gender dissidence, it raises suspicions since the church ascribes to hetero and homonormative ideas toward marriage, family constitution, sexual practices, and religious obedience, to name but a few.
keywords: Queer Linguistics; Brazil; Contemporary Christian Church; Heteronormativity; Homonormativity