Prisons and Closets: U.S. American Protestant Materializations of the Secular

This co-authored paper offers a dialogic analyses of two U.S. American social institutions--early nineteenth century prisons and mid twentieth century sexual closets--at a key moment in their respective historical formation. Building on Michel Foucault's theorization "heterotopias," we analyze these sites as spaces of containment for perverse masculinities, with attention to these material spaces of containment as sedimentations of religious and non-religious imaginations, practices, and institutions. We explore, in particular, how religious imaginaries shape and are shaped by material spaces regarded as “secular.” These secular heterotopias, we argue, were and are materialized through particular Protestant discourses. At the same time, in the dialectic between the imagined and the materialized, they each produce yet another heterotopia--queer and spectral in form-- in which other worlds are imagined, thus queering the hetero of heterotopia.