Your Misogyny is Not a Cultural Difference: Constellating Transnational Stories of Religious Gender-Based Violence and Feminist Resistance
Published in Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space (co-authored with Eda Özyeşilpınar).
An excerpt: “The power of a story is that it provides a place to belong. Sometimes that story is from an archive, other times the story comes from data collected or interviews conducted over the span of several years… My story of fundamentalism is a story of denim skirts, quiet voices, bad education, and deep shame—the kind of shame that sticks to your bones and makes your body tighten at the sound of leather being stretched across bare skin until the lesson is etched into muscle fibers. I learned about science through a series of textbooks that told me the world was six thousand years old and that dinosaurs went extinct when God sent a flood to punish humans for their sins. At the age of eleven, I was taught that my female body was purposefully designed to repopulate the earth—an urgent task for people who believe that the earth needs more Christian women raising Christian men to rule and conquer for the sake of God’s kingdom. My story of fundamentalism meant that I was sneaking books from the library so that I could take AP tests and get into college with scholarships. Education was my exit plan from the church basement. All it took to leave was this body of mine.”
Purity Culture and the Limits of Queer Evangelicalism
Published in Theology and Sexuality (co-authored with Lauren Sawyer)
Abstract: Taking purity culture as a framework for understanding evangelical approaches to sexual ethics, this article examines the connection between the recent emergence of queer evangelical celibacy narratives and the rhetoric of purity as a form of personal freedom. To do so, we approach the construction of queer celibacy through a theology of sexuality and narratives of celibacy within purity culture. We constellate stories from gay- and lesbian-identifying evangelicals to question the limits of queer celibacy. How is evangelical celibacy queer? Can evangelical celibacy claim queerness when it depends on White heterosexist logics? To answer these questions, we explore a series of texts written by evangelical authors who have chosen celibacy as a method for their spiritual commitments while identifying as gay or lesbian. We work with these texts as examples of queer narratives that interanimate paths between evangelical belief and sexual identity.
An excerpt: “This is the kind of event people like to attribute to God or angels or some supernatural force. I will always think of it simply as the tenacity of women’s bodies joining the power of bare life. Why give God credit for the brazen strength of two women? I didn’t sleep well for months. I woke to the sound of my heart beating in my ears or the sticky pools of sweat that drenched my sheets as I dreamt. The river swirled around me for days that bled into weeks, that slipped into months. Until suddenly it grew quiet. But it remains with me. The vulnerability of my body in the face of that honest current doesn’t cling to me, it doesn’t haunt me, it doesn’t come to me in flashes. It sits inside every tendon, every muscle, maybe even every cell. It knows me. It does not inspire or scare or teach me. It simply lives. Nature inspires nothing but itself.”