Preliminary Programme

As a particular strain of conservative Protestantism garnered significant political power in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, prominent conservative women forged new sexual subjectivities by responding to contemporary sexual revolutions in two apparently paradoxical ways. First, they became especially vocal critics of the "sexualization" of American culture. In 1977, Anita Bryant was among the first to make homosexuality a national issue for the emerging New Christian Right. Beverly LaHaye, who founded the national lobbying group Concerned Women for America in 1979, became one of the most vocal critics of contemporary feminism, including what she perceived as feminist advocacy of sexual freedom for heterosexual women and lesbians. Second, conservative women also expanded the bounds of appropriate evangelical sexuality in advice manuals that built on broader traditions of popular Christian writing in the United States and in Britain. Accepting the framework of wifely submission, they wrote about sex and gender relations in ways that subtly shifted existing ideologies and expanded women's roles. Combining these two rhetorical threads in complicated and often surprising ways, conservative Christian women's writing about sex made space for them to claim leadership by pushing but not overstepping the bounds of appropriate femininity in conservative evangelical contexts. This project builds on the insights of scholars like Marie Griffith, Amy DeRogatis, and Seth Dowland, arguing that the shifting sexual discourses of conservative evangelicals in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century were central to the ways in which conservative Christian women claimed political leadership in a movement often dominated by vociferous men and strident defenses of “traditional” gender roles. This paper focuses on the writing of women like Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, and Marabel Morgan, examining the tensions in their work between permissible sexuality and a more vocal antisex discourse, between feminine submission and women's national political leadership. (Show less)

This paper analyses the importance of concepts of purity and honour within legal and moral codes of conduct in Italy from the end of Nineteenth century until today. The importance of purity intended as remaining virgin till marriage for a woman has always been so evident to influence not only the private life of people but also the criminal law. It suffices to think of the existence until 1981 of rehabilitating wedding (matrimonio riparatore) in the Italian Penal Code. It was a sort of shotgun wedding proposed by a rapist to his victim in order to extinguish the crime of sexual assault and to ‘restore’ the female honour lost during the rape. This was especially evident in Southern Italy, where a single woman had to preserve her own reputation and honour, even if it meant getting married with her rapist or to be killed. According to traditional social code, a woman that had lost her virginity without getting married, even if kidnapped and raped, was seen as a ‘woman without honour’ (disonorata) or ‘shameful woman’ (svergognata). For this reason, her ‘purity’ would be restored only by a forced marriage or by the death. Not by chance, for a long time (until 1996), rape was a crime against "public morality" rather than a personal offence. Inspired by the same obsession with purity the article concerning the honour killing, remained in force until 1981. According to this a homicide of a member of a family or social group by other members, committed in order to ‘protect’ his own honour (in case, for example, of adultery) was punished with a lighter sentence. Therefore, retracing the story of Italian criminal law is important not only for its strictly legal considerations but also to understand history of sexuality in Italy and its social and cultural implications. (Show less)

In the mid-1960s, Keith St. Clare, Joel Roberts, and Adrian Ravarour fled abusive homes and found each other in the low-rent apartment buildings, coffee shops, and street corners of San Francisco’s Tenderloin “vice” district. In 1966, along with others, they founded the early gay liberation organization Vanguard and also created their own extra-ecclesiastical “street churches.” In this presentation, part of a larger project revolving around religious ritual, anti-poverty movement, and queer world making in U.S. central city “tenderloin” districts, I draw on original oral histories and archival research to show how through overlapping religious and secular ideals of “communion,” “service,” and “unity of brotherhood,” they drew on existing theological traditions to fashion narratives in which individual feelings of worthlessness, stigma, and pain could be reinterpreted as collective acts of transcendence and union—and, importantly, translated into collective political action. Drawing on Christian narratives, iconography, and ritual to reinterpret the impact of social exclusion and structural violence, I argue that Vanguard is representative of an ongoing tradition of aesthetic and religious responses to violence that is collectively shared and specific to tenderloin districts across the United States. (Show less)