Propiedades y Especificaciones Técnicas de los Materiales

For the purposes of this dissertation, “American sexual exceptionalism” refers to an understanding of American sexuality as distinct from and superior to the presumed religio-sexual perversity of the

105 _{On the brutality of exclusion, see Bercovitch as cited in Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the}

Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 22. On the epistemic violence inherent in knowledge production, see Spivak’s seminal “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: a Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–97.

religious or non-native outsider.106 American sexual exceptionalism functions as a distinctive yet

universalized sexual normativity. Queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s understanding of the role sexuality plays in promoting American exceptionalism directly informs my own. In her 2007 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar argues that exceptionalism “paradoxically signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as excellence (imminence, superiority).”107 She

maintains that discourses of sexual exceptionalism configure the United States as “an exceptional nation-state,” one whose policies and moralities manifestas somehow unique and universalizable.108

Suspicions of sexual misconduct have a special ability to discredit people in American public discourse, never more so than when such accusations occur under the auspices of religion.109 Such

anxieties frequently occasion well-intentioned liberatory discourse that nevertheless polices the boundaries of what counts as real/true/good American religion: we (insiders) need to save them

(outsiders). As I noted above, though, the public response to such doctrines or practices is often massively disproportionate to the number of citizens who engage in them.110 Indeed, minority

religions are frequently suspected and accused of sexual deviance and coercion regardless of their communities’ mores or practices.111

Discourses of American sexual exceptionalism produce and require an “other,” what sociologists of moral panics call a “folk demon,” an individual or group that emerges as predatory

106 _{Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.} 107 _Ibid.

108 _{Ibid., 3, 8.}

109 _{On the “specialness” of religion, see Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the}

Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Regarding the particular glee of public sphere discourse regarding sexual misconduct in religious communities, see Ewing, “Religion, Spirituality, and the Sexual Scandal.”

110 _{Givens, The Viper on the Hearth, 42, 87.}

and perverse, particularly toward women and children.112 Rhetorics of American sexual

exceptionalism (“good” sex) foster condemnation of the folk demon’s imagined predatory perversity. American sexual exceptionalism at once condemns and marginalizes these imagined sexual

transgressions, insisting that sexual misdeeds are horrifying but also (and more importantly) fundamentally other-than American.

American sexual exceptionalism bolsters intolerant rhetoric and actions on the grounds of protecting vulnerable Americans from the (presumed) sexual predation of religious outsiders. American sexual exceptionalism accuses religious outsiders of sexual deviancy in the process of “discerning, othering, and quarantining” folk demons; these religiously and sexually perverse figures also “labor in the service of disciplining and normalizing subjects worthy of rehabilitation away from

these bodies.”113 Such exceptionalist rhetoric further disciplines and normalizes American sexuality

as something distinct and precious, in need of protection from the perverse sexuality of imagined religious predators.

Thus in this dissertation, I argue that public rhetoric about minority religions demonstrates the extent to which particular notions of normative sexuality have shaped and constrained popular understandings of real American religion since the early 1980s. I engage several popular narratives that portray minority religions (Islam, Mormonism, and witchcraft) as predatory, coercing or duping vulnerable American women and children into religious nonconformity and sexual transgression. In these narratives, normative sexuality—understood as binary, marital, moderately procreative, and heterosexual—marks the boundary of acceptable American religiosity and the limit of American religious tolerance. At the same time, a shared popular sense of good sex authorizes the surveillance and regulation of minority religious practices without overtly seeming to violate America’s professed

112 _{Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford: Oxford}

University Press, 2006).

commitment to religious pluralism and freedom. In this way, public rhetoric discourages religious nonconformity even as it promotes normative sexual practices. This strategy’s efficacy lies in its claim to protect America’s most vulnerable citizens, women and children.

Narratives like Under the Banner of Heaven, Not Without My Daughter, and Michelle Remembers

identify the people and problems of religious minorities as somehow outside contemporary American culture – as though women and children were not abused in other contexts, as though such abuse were the product of peculiar theologies rather than broader systemic inequalities. This kind of intolerant rhetoric authorizes real Americans, in their common sense and shared values, to police the sexual transgressions (real or imagined) of religious outsiders while looking away from the sexual crimes happening in their own homes and families. Authors like Jon Krakauer, Betty Mahmoody, and Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder identify minority religions as the proper targets of intolerance—and the women and children of marginal religions as especially vulnerable

populations—while drawing attention away from the prevalence of mainstream, presumably secular abuses.

The narratives that constitute my case studies simultaneously condemn the abuse of women and children while doing little, if anything, to prevent or disrupt such violence. The authors

consistently recount tales of horrific sexual violence against women to demonstrate the barbarity of their abusers, and ostensibly the need for commonsense Americans to intervene. But as sociologist Mary de Young notes, “sexual trauma tales can sustain the status quo by simply reiterating, without critique, the dominant cultural discourse about sex and gender.”114 As she explains:

For all their horror, [these stories] are conservative and preservative. Their depiction of female victimization and helplessness so resoundingly resonates with dominant cultural ideologies that the stories, themselves, are pitiable yet provocative tales about the inevitability of sexual violence in the lives of females. As hegemonic tales, they offer no

114 _{Mary de Young, “Breeders for Satan: Toward a Sociology of Sexual Trauma Tales,” Journal of American Culture 19,}

solutions, map out no trajectory for social change. They can only be listened to, not acted upon.115

I would qualify de Young’s assessment here, as I will argue throughout this dissertation that stories like Banner, Daughter, and Michelle can be and have been acted upon. However, de Young’s basic assertion is correct. Public responses to such narrativizations protect and maintain normative American sexuality as exceptional, while reinforcing hierarchical gendered assumptions about women’s inherent vulnerability, capitalizing on the titillating details of the abuses they chronicle, and ultimately doing little if anything to prevent the kinds of abuses the authors purport to condemn. These exotic and damning portrayals of minority religions effectively limit the conditions of religious possibility in contemporary America. And, as I will discuss in the following section, public discourse that singles out minority religions as particularly prone to sexual abuse promotes intolerance toward religious minorities while appearing to conform to the perception of the United States as a nation exceptionally committed to both religious tolerance and diversity.