Verificación del Diseño de los Elementos Estructurales de concreto armado

This project engages three best-selling popular nonfiction narratives published between 1980 and 2003. These three narratives— Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), Betty Mahmoody’s

Not Without My Daughter (1987), and Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers

(1980)—are rich and illuminating examples of American public discourse concerning normative sexuality and tolerable religion. Each of these narratives portrays a minority religion as intolerable by providing “evidence” of that religion’s sexual exploitation of American women and children. I focus on these narrativizations because of their remarkable popularity among American readers, but also because each book has been used as evidence in public actions against the minority religion it describes. The minority religions in question—Mormonism, Islam, and witchcraft—have, as I will show, been the target of mainstream American suspicion and intolerance.

Taken as a whole, these books and the public’s reaction to them reveal a persistent and troubling pattern of response toward religious and sexual difference within the American public sphere. The public has responded to these books (and books like them) by attempting to liberate women and children from minority religions. As I explore in subsequent chapters, such attempts at liberation have alienated fundamentalist Mormon women from social services intended to help them, have discounted women’s desire to become or remain Muslim and worsened conditions for women in Muslim-majority countries, and have led to the imprisonment of childcare givers on specious and unsubstantiated accusations of satanic child abuse.

The first chapter, “The Trouble with Tolerance,” reviews pertinent literature on the subject of American religious intolerance and underscores the role normative sexuality plays in constructing and constraining American religion. I argue that popular understandings of American religion have been shaped by normalized or secularized mainline Christianity, and normalized Christian sexual ethics in particular. Religious intolerance in contemporary America mobilizes popular anxieties about sexual bodies and sexual practices to marginalize minority religions. Such intolerance is not always explicit. I propose that ostensibly secular scholarly assumptions about what does and does not constitute American religion have been informed by normalized Christian sexual ethics. I present these three popular pulp nonfiction narratives—Under the Banner of Heaven, Not Without My Daughter,

and Michelle Remembers—as texts that promote intolerance of marginal American religions based in suspicions of non-normative sexuality.

The second chapter, “An Unusual Place: Do Mormon Fundamentalists Really Need

Saving?,” argues that public discourse about liberating Mormon fundamentalist women and children constrains Americans’ religious and sexual freedoms while impeding abuse victims’ access to support and assistance. I first examine Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

(2003). Krakauer’s work portrays Mormon fundamentalist identity as defined by the practice of polygamy; his hypersexualized and sensationalized portrayal of Mormon fundamentalism relies on a normalized Christian sexual ethic to marginalize this religious minority. Next, I examine public responses to Banner’s publication. I pay particular attention to the legislative hearings preceding the 2008 raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Yearning for Zion ranch, during which Krakauer testified as an expert witness on Mormonism and Mormon fundamentalism. Finally, I examine the protectionist discourse surrounding Mormon

fundamentalism – public declarations that Mormon fundamentalist women are necessarily forced or duped into plural marriage and thus are in need of rescue and protection by the American body politic. This rhetoric positions Mormon fundamentalism outside contemporary American culture

and ignores the complexity of these Mormon fundamentalist women’s religious and sexual agency. Reporters, lawmakers, and social workers involved all consistently discounted the possibility that some Mormon fundamentalist women had deliberately chosen to remain in their minority religious community and in their unconventional marriages. Most significantly, this case study demonstrates that attempts to rescue religious minorities may actually hinder the ability of abuse victims to seek assistance while failing to prevent systemic abuses of women and children.

The third chapter, “‘Daddy, Do I Hate Americans?’ Domestic Terrorism and American Exceptionalism after the Iran Hostage Crisis,” argues that Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) essentializes Muslim masculinity as a frustrated lasciviousness that necessarily oppresses and abuses women, thus authorizing public anti-Muslim sentiment. I first examine the extent to which the book and film versions of Not Without My Daughter characterize Muslim men as domestic terrorists, racially, sexually, and religiously perverse. Next, I show that the author’s self- characterization exemplifies an American sexual exceptionalism, simultaneously authorizing anti- Islamic sentiment and demonstrating the perils of marriage outside the American mainstream. Finally, I consider the ways in which the dual discourses of domestic terrorism and American sexual exceptionalism preoccupied the American public sphere in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis. The discursive construction of Muslim masculinity as racially, sexually, and religiously perverse ignores the theological and practical complexities of lived Islam, occludes significant evidence of American domestic abuse absent of supposed religious motivation, and (as with the previous case study) disregards the possibility of women’s willing participation in minority religions.

The final chapter, “Play Me Backwards: Feminist Complicity in the Satanic Panic,” argues that feminist activism during the 1980s through the mid-1990s surrounding satanic ritual abuse both reinforced American sexual exceptionalism and restricted American women’s religious and sexual freedoms. I present Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers (1980) as the catalyst for widespread accusations of satanic ritual abuse in the United States. I emphasize that the text

shaped later portrayals of satanic ritual abuse, particularly with regard to the text’s infantilization of the victim, the construction of child abuse as a distinctly religious phenomenon, and the link established between Satanism and child sexual abuse. Finally, I examine the feminist complicity in promoting satanic ritual abuse accusations, which I argue reinforced American sexual exceptionalism and restricted American women’s religious and sexual freedoms by discouraging American mothers from working outside the home and Americans in general from participating in a demonstrably feminist mode of religiosity, modern witchcraft.

The conclusion considers the significance and problematic nature of American sexual exceptionalism, particularly in relation to minority religions. Public rhetoric that constructs minority religions as necessarily dangerous, irrational, and perverse neither reflects the lived experience of many members of these minority religions nor protects survivors of domestic and sexual abuses. Drawing on the work of political scientist Sarah Song and social critic Teju Cole, I propose constructive approaches to helping vulnerable members of American minority religions. These include paying attention to the consequences of narrativizing contact with social outsiders and, perhaps most importantly, taking seriously the expressed desires, needs, and recounted experiences of minority religions’ members themselves.