| abstract |
The aim of this project is to understand how young white women and white queer youth of all genders act as sexual and moral agents within purity culture while still being vulnerable to its harmful structures. I recognize contemporary purity culture, or the purity-focused sexual ethics espoused by conservative evangelicals and their institutions, as inherently white supremacist, a recapitulation of other purity cultures or movements within United States social history. Like other purity movements, contemporary evangelical purity culture positioned white children and adolescents as in need of patriarchal protection—most often protection from the racialized other. Rather than only recognizing how young people are victimized by purity culture, I argue that young people made choices that were both, and sometimes simultaneously, liberative and harmful to themselves and others.
To attend to this, I build on the work of queer, childist, and feminist scholars who invite us to a more expansive understanding of youth, not as un- or underdeveloped adults but full queer subjects and interdependent agents. Their choices frustrate the prevailing Western psychological and philosophical developmental theories that presume a certain trajectory of childhood from asexual to sexual, innocent to mature, deviant to normative. Affording youth epistemological privilege, I turn to the lived experiences of white girls and white queer youth as they grew up in purity culture (collected through memoirs and personal narratives). I show how their choices do not always make adult sense, nor are they easily categorized as morally good or bad.
Critics of contemporary evangelical purity culture have raised important arguments against its inherent sexism, heterosexism, and its contribution to rape culture. However, much less has been written on the ways in which white youth are both harmed by and are active participates in purity culture as a mechanism of white supremacy. While I do not offer my own post-purity culture sexual ethic, I offer the concept of "orgasmic failure" as a starting point for understanding adolescent sexuality as part of the broader story of human sexuality.
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