Narrative, Ex-gay Ministries and the Re-education of Desire

Lori Heintzelman

Abstract for paper presented at
Lavender Languages and Linguistics XI Conference
American University, Washington, DC
February 2004

Despite recent significant advances in gay civil rights, there is still strong impetus to view homosexuality as pathological. The evangelical Christian organization Exodus continues "Proclaiming to, educating, and impacting the world with the biblical truth that freedom from homosexuality is possible when Jesus is Lord of one's life" (www.exodus-international.org). Michel Foucault (1990) contends that sexuality is a particularly dense site of (public) power relations, with normalization/regulation often achieved through discursive means. Debate continues about whether homosexuality is innate, environmental, or chosen, and--relatedly--morally assessable. Exodus is strongly invested in this debate. Although its "transformation" methodology consists of prayer, counseling, and support to "strugglers" at the local level, I argue that its success is in a larger truth-making endeavor, i.e. fashioning and perpetuating a Master Narrative, counter to those currently circulating and gaining favor, of homosexuality as maladaptation that can be repaired. Exodus deploys a number of linguistic strategies to effect a "re-education of desire" (Stoler, 1995). These are reflected as individual "sexual identity reconstruction" (Ponticelli, 1999) in the testimonies of those who claim "ex-gay" status. This paper will explore those strategies using transcribed testimonies from past Exodus conferences and ethnographic data gathered at the July 2003 Exodus annual conference.

Lori Hentzelman is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Lori.Heintzelman@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1 - June 2004