Diego Garcia Rodriguez (2017 Cohort)

About me: Born and raised in Hellin, Spain, I grew up within a working-class family who always encouraged me to study hard. I hold a Master of Science in Asian Studies (Lund University/National University of Singapore) and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism (University Complutense of Madrid, University of Tampere and Korea University). Since I left Spain in 2011, I have lived and worked in between Europe and Asia in, among other countries, Finland, South Korea, Sweden, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. My Master’s dissertation at Lund University explored the emergence of progressive discourses within Indonesian Islam in relation to non-normative genders and sexualities. Some of the scholarships I have received throughout my career are the Erasmus Scholarship to study at the University of Tampere in Finland, the Complutense Exchange Scholarship to attend Korea University in Seoul (South Korea), the Exchange Scholarship to study at the National University of Singapore and the NIAS SUPRA Nordic scholarship at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

When not working from my office chair, I enjoy wandering around London, travelling to Spain to see my family and friends, pretending to be a singer, eating nasi goreng and losing my keys.

My research: Since I first visited Indonesia in 2014, the country has become the key location of my research, through which I explore gender, sexuality and religious issues.

While dominant discourses have perpetuated the assumption that Islam is a monolithic and barbaric religion that oppresses women and non-normative genders and sexualities, Muslims the world over have found ways to experience Islam as an ‘empowering’ force. Using the Indonesian island of Java as my primary fieldwork site, my research aims to examine the role that intersecting gender, sexuality and religious subjectivities and subject positions play in relation to the emergence of potential religious ‘empowerment’ processes and outcomes.

The difference my research makes: The contribution that my research makes to contemporary scholarship on Indonesia, Islam, gender and sexuality is both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, it provides an account of the lived realities of Indonesian Muslims. Theoretically, I aim to make use of my empirical data to challenge the assumption that women and queer Muslims are oppressed subjects in need of saving by conceptualising queer religious powers as part of potential contingent and fluid ‘empowering’ processes and outcomes. This means paying attention to the ways in which religion, gender and sexuality are experienced in these actors’ everyday religion exploring both their intrapersonal and interactional dimensions. In this manner, I aim to explore the ways in which certain Muslim subjects replicate, strengthen, resist and rework norms and potential tensions. This will take place considering what agency, freedom, liberation and norms might mean in the Indonesian context against their conceptualisations in liberal thought. In order to do so, my study rejects the understanding of agency as simple resistance aiming to trace the emergence of modalities of action that are operationalised in the intersection of various selves by performing, inhabiting and experiencing norms in diverse ways.

Supervisors: Dr Richard Mole and Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Publications and conferences:

September 2018. Panel convenor at the ASEASUK Conference. Currently looking for speakers: http://aseasuk.org.uk/4/sites/default/files/files/23%20Rodriguez%20Religious%20Empowerment.pdf
January 2018. Accepted chapter for the book “Islam and Social Justice”, edited by Professor Bee Scherer, Canterbury Christ Church University.
Upcoming. Book review on “Recovering the Female Voice in Islamic Scripture: Women and Silence” (Jardim, 2014) and “Men in charge? Rethinking authority in Muslim legal tradition” (Mir-Hosseini et al, 2015) for the Journal of Religion and Gender.
September 2017. “Queering Islam: LGBT emancipation through Muslim faith in Indonesia”, Presentation at the IV European Geographies of Sexualities Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 13-15 September 2017.
August 2017. “Waiting for the Worst”, Zed Books website (https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/waiting-for-the-worst/).
December 2017. Book review on “Fleeing Homophobia: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Asylum” (Spijkerboer, 2013) for the Journal of Refugee Studies.
August 2017. “Queer Indonesian Islam: Negotiating LGBT and Muslim Identities”, Presentation at the EUROSEAS Conference, University of Oxford, UK.
February 2017. Book review on “Gender and Sexualities in Muslim Culture” (Ozyegin, 2015) for the Gender Forum Journal at the University of Cologne, Germany.
December 2016. Accepted chapter for the book “Women-Identified Sexualities and Islam”, edited by Professor Huma Ghosh, San Diego State University.
August 2015. “When sexuality met faith: The Youth Interfaith Forum on Sexuality”, article on Inside Indonesia (http://www.insideindonesia.org/when-sexuality-meets-faith)
April 2015. “Queer Indonesian Islam: Negotiating LGBT and Muslim Identities”, Presentation at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
January 2015. “Queer Indonesian Islam: Negotiating LGBT and Muslim Identities”, Presentation at the Institute of Ethnic Studies, National University of Malaysia.
January 2015 “Queer Indonesian Islam: Negotiating LGBT and Muslim Identities”, Presentation at the 7th Annual Chinese University Hong Kong Anthropology Postgraduate Student Forum.