July 20, 2021

White Feminine Innocence, the Body Politic, and Contraceptive Nationalism

White Feminine Innocence, the Body Politic, and Contraceptive Nationalism

+ Catholicism's White Supremacy Problem

Dr. Megan Goodwin is the author of Abusing Religion, which explores how White Christians and their influence in our "secular" institutions have constructed religious outsiders as sexual predators as a pretext for persecution and othering. The American body politic is envisioned as a White Christian woman in need of protection from religious (and racial) foreigners who seek to infiltrate and contaminate her.

According to Goodwin, this is mobilized through the "catholicization of public morality" as it comes to sex, contraception, and the body--what she calls a "contraceptive nationalism."

It also rests on latent White supremacy, which is manifest in both Protestant and Catholic institutions, communities, texts, and so on.

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