Performativity of religious conversion/”cure” of homosexuality in “Encontro com Deus”: regulation of sexuality and prejudice

Abstract

This study investigates the apparatus of the religious “cure” of homosexuality by analyzing a form of an evangelical spiritual retreat known as “Encontro com Deus.” This study is based on a documentary and ethnographic archive that includes the testimony of one of the authors. Via discourse analysis based on the concept of performativity, this study found relations between scientific and non-scientific discursive practices in the construction of homosexuality as a moral pathology and the development of religious conversion technologies to “cure” it. The findings suggest that such religious “cure” of homosexuality involves a series of performative acts of conversion by which the converted/cured subject must be incessantly produced and must publicly attest to their salvation via testimonies. These acts mobilize a network of meanings and rituals that promote subjects’ moral and aesthetic transformation by articulating heterogeneous epistemological perspectives that legitimize prejudice across forms of knowledge.