Facebook profiling has come to be widely understood as the key or even ultimate identity
formation, featuring instantaneous information about bodies, identities, religion, sexuality
and religious affiliations. However, this article has explored the difficulties and complexities
involved when certain aspects of young people’s identities collide. In the case
of queer religious youth, and often during periods of intense transition, exploration and
change, this article has made way for thinking about Facebook and online networks and
communication as a (new) space of deep significance during such transitions. In contrast
with online technologies creating difficulties and unwelcome exposure, many of the participants
in ‘making space for queer-identifying religious youth’ worked with these new
spaces in order to produce opportunities for negotiation between their religious and
queer identities. Exciting research into sexualities and the process of coming out as
LGBT has shown that this continues to be a highly embodied and emotional journey,
layered with complex social histories and discourses of shame, pride, anger and fear
(Taylor and Falconer, in press; Taylor and Snowdon, 2014b). The young people in this
research have highlighted how online technology can be used as a tool to negotiate this
process in different ways. Using the space of Facebook, Twitter and Skype to remove the
visceral body from an otherwise highly embodied face-to-face encounter at times provides
welcome respite for young people. Facebook and Skype can also create new timescales
as well as spaces, both speeding up and slowing down the temporal process of
expressing queer and religious identities. Again, this can distort earlier patterns of the
‘before and after’ effect of coming out, and help avoid undesired embodied presences in
particular moments of interaction or discovery. In thinking through ‘10 Years of
Facebook’, there is a greater need to examine more closely the role of embodiment, disconnection
and emotional complexities in social research into Facebook and other forms
of social media. This builds upon the valuable, if not limited, conceptualisation of ‘online
embodiment’ to incorporate a greater wealth of emotional and embodied geographies
that can benefit the analysis of future research beyond the specific cohort of this study.