We are pleased to share that the Storying Relationships project team have been working on our first draft of the forthcoming Zed publication, Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love.
This book explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. These stories emerge in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish.
These stories open up spaces in which they are able to explore experiences and to identify and make choices. They also disrupt wider stereotypes about Muslims, which revolve around sex and love: stereotypes about Muslims being locked into loveless marriages and bullied by tyrannical patriarchs, for example, and about young people who neither know nor express their own sexual desires.
So when young Muslims speak about sex and love, the stories they tell are not only interesting; it is also important that these stories are heard.