Community Belonging: LGBTQ+ Experiences in a Regional Australian Setting

Belonging to community among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, plus (LGBTQ+) peoples is predominantly considered in relation to identity and effects on wellbeing, rather than conceptualised as producing malleable, diverse, intersectional, and importantly constructed communities. This analysis seeks to better understand how knowledge of gender- and sexuality-based communities change when belonging is regarded to be possible because, and as a product of, exchanges and desires that individuals navigate with each other, and specifically so within the regional, agricultural, and conservative setting of Toowoomba in Australia. Drawing upon a mixed-methods health and wellbeing survey of 87 LGBTQ+ peoples from Toowoomba, Australia, this paper employs Elspeth Probyn and Nira Yuval-Davis′s alternate visions of belonging and community. This piece explores how belonging, at the level of relations and desires between people, places, and things, produce a sense of community rather than assuming that communities are bound by only particular and fixed factors, including calling into question the very processes that produce resolute notions of community. As such, this critical analysis provides grounds for belonging in the possibility of an expansive inclusivity that might sharpen social policy and health and wellbeing initiatives to better reflect and address the diversity and mutability of the Toowoomba based LGBTQ+ population.