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: “I have often wondered what kind of power would come with clarity around my body and the stories it holds. All I have ever known and had access to lives within my body, in my fingers as I type, in my feet as I walk, in all the words that my mouth has formed while I was trying to exit the church basements. I craved wholeness, not to be a part of God’s master plan, but to be entirely unto myself. Writing is a way to exit the loneliness of all my body cannot speak…
The argument we make in this article is the argument our bodies make in protest to the violence that stretches forever across gendered religious landscapes. This violence bleeds out into the political, the social, and the cultural dimensions of our lives. Misogyny rooted in religious systems answers only to a male God, leaving little room for voices of dissent. To believe that the kinds of gendered violence happening in religious contexts are limited to those specific spaces might make readers feel better. However, religious spaces are not self-contained.
The rhetorical power of religious violence, specifically against women, also flows through legislative, educational, and social avenues. Education was my exit plan from the church basement. All it took to leave was this body of mine… There is no such thing as an easy intervention in religious structures that perpetuate gendered violence. Even so, there are possibilities for us to find our way back into the body, and in sharing our stories here we offer others the opportunity to do the same.”
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.”