A Fountain Sealed: Virginity and the American Evangelical Family

This thesis is a psychoanalytic and feminist critique of the contemporary American abstinence movement that finds its roots within Christian evangelicalism, but has far-reaching public impact on social policy and education and contributes to an ideology of nationhood. Through the examination of the phenomena of virginity pledging and purity ball events for fathers and daughters, it is shown that notions of purity, in this context, have more to do with the narcissistic production of white, middle-class, Christian families and traditional gender identities, and less to do with sexual ethics. Chapter one provides a historical framework for understanding the contemporary virginity movement within the context of Christian eschatology, with a particular focus on premillennialism and its mandate to protect believers from the corruption of the non-Christian world until the imminent return of Christ and the rapture of the Christian elect. Chapter two is an examination of the influence of conservative Christian values on American politics and sex education. Chapter three is an analysis of the phenomenon of virginity pledging, its definition of what constitutes sex, its effectiveness at delaying first intercourse and curbing rates of disease and teen pregnancy, its success as an identity movement and its propagation of traditional gender roles and fantasies of true love. Chapter four begins with a discussion of the convergence of conservative evangelical and Freudian views of psycho-sexual normativity in relation to virginity and the family then applies psychoanalytic theories of narcissism to virginity pledging and purity balls, revealing some of the psychological aspects of this movement such as the oedipal dynamics between fathers and daughters. Chapter five outlines a model of transcendent intersubjectivity as an alternative to the narcissistic, oedipal subjectivity found in the purity movement and explores the way that language and ideology function in the formation of gendered subjective and intersubjective self-understandings with a final proposal of the possibility of an alternative, ethical view of abstinence that does not appeal to notions of purity.Ph