In light of the unit’s 20th anniversary, this panel underscores the enduring significance of studying the intersection of religion and sexuality, particularly in the face of the resurgence of harmful forms purity culture and sexual surveillance. The papers within it reflect on historical and contemporary anxieties around diverse and ‘deviant’ sexualities. They examine various contexts, such as the influence of white evangelical purity culture in the United States, the complex interplay of religion and politics in public and private spheres in Rwanda, and the impact of technological surveillance and anti-porn shameware. Further, this panel also offers opportunities for deconstructing harmful religious and sexual frameworks as they explore strategies, invisibilities and potentialities for (re)imagining more hopeful and flourishing futures.
In the past twenty years, scholars and former adherents of White evangelical purity culture that originated in the 1990s have offered numerous engagements of the culture’s originating political contexts, theological scaffolding, and wounding legacies. This paper draws from those efforts to posit that a new and dangerous purity culture is emerging in this contemporary moment with gender essentialism as its organizing principle. It articulates significant characteristics of this campaign, investigates the role of movements for freedom that catalyze constricting frameworks, and, informed by historical precedents, names potential strategies for critiquing and curtailing this emerging purity culture.
In this paper, I investigate the overlapping modes of religious, political, and social surveillance of queer Rwandans. I argue that such surveillance of sexuality in the centralized public sphere in Rwanda pushes queer sexuality further to the margins, eventually enabling and encouraging surveillance in marginalized public spheres and in private, domestic, and intimate spaces. In a post-genocide context that prohibits LGBT visibility, these layers of surveillance result in LGBT Rwandans somewhat paradoxically participating quite visibly in hetero-marriage and reproduction as forms queer survival, creating networks of hidden love and clandestine relationships while attempting to skirt social stigma. My work expands scholarship on sexuality, gender, and race by arguing that Rwanda’s queer politics of invisibility can provide an alternative to the queer politics of representation and visibility so prized in the Western discourse.
How does evangelicalism maintain control around licit sex/sexuality, when endless illicit versions attend a world increasingly infused with technology? In the quest to curb immoral behavior, a lucrative industry of accountability apps and organizations provides a key mechanism for surveillance and containment. The ubiquity of internet pornography is especially threatening, exposing the porosity of boundaries needed to discern “true” believers with a “God-ordained” sexuality. This paper considers the role of sexual surveillance within evangelical purity culture via “shameware” to better understand the contestations surrounding sexuality and gender revealed by spiritualized pathologizing practices, and how these pathologies are reimagined by once-believers now operating under new sexual schemas. Examining how adherents make sense of their participation, and the modalities in which exvangelicals shift, reject, or rearrange sexual surveillance allows for greater insight into the sexual schemas of both groups, the geography of deconstruction, and the messy potentiality in these sense-making endeavors.
| Catherine Roach | View |