Diego Garcia Rodriguez

Diego holds a PhD in Gender and Sexuality Studies (UCL), a MSc in Asian Studies (Lund University/NUS) and a BA in Journalism (University Complutense of Madrid, University of Tampere and Korea University). Since 2011, he has lived and worked in Finland, South Korea, Sweden, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. His Master’s dissertation explored the emergence of progressive discourses within Indonesian Islam in relation to non-normative genders and sexualities. Some of the grants he has received include the Erasmus Scholarship, the Complutense Exchange Scholarship, the Lund University Exchange Scholarship, the NIAS SUPRA scholarship (University of Copenhagen), the Annette Lawson Charitable Trust scholarship, and the UBEL DTP ESRC PhD grant. His PhD examined the everyday religion of Indonesian LGBTIQ+ Muslims. He developed a theoretical framework to conceptualise queer religious agency moving beyond traditional conceptualisations of agency as resistance to religious norms, paying attention to the myriad ways through which queer Indonesian Muslims embody religious rituals through submission. Drawing upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Java, he also explored the development of progressive Islam in the country and the role of whom he called allies of queer Muslims. Between 2020 and 2021, Diego worked as a Senior Researcher for a social justice consultancy company for international NGOs, local authorities, academic institutions and government bodies. He has organised panels and conferences on LGBTIQ+-related issues at institutions such as SOAS University of London. Diego is currently co-editing a special edition of the journal Indonesia and the Malay World on LGBT moral panics in Indonesia.