In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 103 4 Sacrificing Gender From “Republican Mothers” to Defense of Marriage Acts I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way in the new Code of Laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If peculiar care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. —Abigail Adams to her husband, John, March 1776 In slavery, masters held people in bondage using religious reasoning that worked in tandem with ruthless economic exploitation and brutal force.1 European “Christians” exercised this innocent domination with unique zeal against Africans, but they also used it with other groups, particularly the indigenous peoples of North America.2 But perhaps the most remarkable and consistent feature of religious tyranny in American history, as the epigraph from Abigail Adams might suggest, is its application to constructions of gender and sex.3 Until 1920, women were systematically excluded from voting in U.S. federal elections. That this exclusion was grounded in religion is still not widely recognized. But in the nineteenth century, when women began to agitate in earnest for suffrage during what some scholars have called the first wave of American feminism, activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton , author of The Woman’s Bible, came to recognize that earning the vote would depend on undermining some durable religious constructions.4 In American history, religious violence has often been focused on displacing sexual desire and compressing or regulating sexual relations into normalized 104 | Sacrificing Gender forms, all with a patina of transcendent innocence or moral righteousness.5 Women have been the most frequent victims.6 Over the course of American history, anxiety over gender differentiation has repeatedly produced violence, in which religion has served as a “hidden hand” to protect and produce patriarchal or hierarchical privilege.7 If religions exist to eliminate things in the interest of concentrating cultural power, they have proved to be consistent, if slippery, cultural vehicles to eliminate the voices and agency of some people. They have done so through constructs of male and female gender roles, identities, or sexual practices operating as conventions. In these constructs, which carry the weight of transcendent authority (as either natural or God’s law), some people are allowed to express their desires while others must be suppressed and contained.8 This violence that sacrifices sex—to put it bluntly—has taken many forms. But as historian Nancy F. Cott has persuasively shown, the American nation-state has consistently sought to channel sexual desire into what has come to be called a monogamous heterosexual marriage, in which male dominance is exercised over female submission and heterosexual dominance is asserted over and against gays and lesbians.9 Even more, what literary scholar Amy Kaplan cleverly dubbed “manifest domesticities” have had imperial consequences that framed public policies through the elimination or sacrifice of some private practices.10 These sacrifices of sex are religious constructs, which again is the crucial point. Sexuality is, of course, one of the main sources of human desire, and its regulation is a regular feature of most religious traditions. In American history, however, these religious efforts have blurred or even obliterated the lines between church and state, between private acts and public policies. In recent decades, various patriarchs (and their female consorts) in the United States have tended to target their concern about some forms of sexual expression or sexual desire on efforts to contain gay and lesbian sexual practices. These efforts to channel desire have been carried out through the so-called DOMA laws, or “Defense of Marriage Acts.”11 These acts are officially constructed in “secular” terms in a nod to the First Amendment’s disestablishment of religion, but in fact the language of the acts reveals how fully they borrow from and build on explicitly religious efforts to fix a stable heterosexual norm for marriage and on the efforts to eliminate public expressions of female desire that Abigail Adams regarded as a “tyranny” and against which she threatened rebellion.12 A remarkable text from early America in which these patterns play out is the Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey, first published...

Share