From LiLLes to lilies: an autoethnography of coming out and coming in to a later in life queer eco-spiritual identity

ABSTRACT

Most of my life I both pressed against social constructions of gender and sexuality and tried to fit within those same social constructions. After being married for twenty-six years as a cis-gender woman in a heterosexual relationship, raising three children, and serving as a pastor and faith-based nonprofit director in a conservative religious tradition and community, I leaned into and authentically claimed my sexual identity as a queer lesbian womxn. When I decided to pursue a PhD and research the intersections of gender, sexuality, spirituality, and religion, I discovered a large community of later in life lesbian womxn with stories like mine where I could belong. My spiritual journey into an authentic gender and sexual identity has also been a journey into belonging with the more than human world. Using a framework of queer ecofeminism and the method of critical autoethnography to engage my coming out later in life narrative offers the opportunity to explore how individual intersectional experiences of gender and sexuality can inform and impact collective social justice and environmental justice efforts in the work to dismantle oppressive binary systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer ecofeminism
• critical autoethnography
• later in life lesbians
• eco-spiritual social work
• gender
• sexuality
• eco-justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term womxn was introduced as an intersectional alternative to the term woman or women as a response to misogyny and to remove the defining binary relationship to man or men. The term womxn was also intended to be more inclusionary of those historically marginalized by white feminism. However, the term does not eliminate binary constructions of gender entirely and is often still considered exclusionary when used to label others within queer populations, particularly transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary individuals (Barradas, 2021). I have intentionally chosen to use the terms womxn and women within this piece to recognize and to hold the tension between living within binary heteronormative constructs and pressing into the liminal space beyond those constructs. I invite the reader to wrestle with these terms and the ideas they represent.