Liturgies of Whiteness: Purity, Power, and the Making of American Femininity

Kim-Kort draws together insights from three works--an article on purity balls, an analysis of abortion criminalization of women of color, and a teaching module she wrote about Asian/American women and evangelical Christianity. Her research around evangelical purity culture began with looking specifically at two documentary sources--The Virgin Daughters and Virgin Tales. She sought to analyze purity balls as a set of ritualized practices that construct gendered, racialized, and national subjectivities. She argued that these rituals function as cultural liturgies that sacralize virginity and authorize patriarchal family structures. Taken together, purity balls, purity discourse, and reproductive criminalization illustrate what she argues is purity culture's central function: the production and maintenance of a racialized gender regime that links sexual behavior to theological legitimacy, to family structure, and ultimately to national belonging. Purity becomes a mechanism of subject formation that is simultaneously theological and political, operating across the domains of ritual practice, domestic life, public policy, and the carceral state.

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https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.00073

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