Sexual Surveillance: Purity, Politics and Porn

How does evangelicalism maintain control around licit sex/sexuality, when endless illicit versions attend a world increasingly infused with technology? In the quest to curb immoral behavior, a lucrative industry of accountability apps and organizations provides a key mechanism for surveillance and containment. The ubiquity of internet pornography is especially threatening, exposing the porosity of boundaries needed to discern “true” believers with a “God-ordained” sexuality. This paper considers the role of sexual surveillance within evangelical purity culture via “shameware” to better understand the contestations surrounding sexuality and gender revealed by spiritualized pathologizing practices, and how these pathologies are reimagined by once-believers now operating under new sexual schemas. Examining how adherents make sense of their participation, and the modalities in which exvangelicals shift, reject, or rearrange sexual surveillance allows for greater insight into the sexual schemas of both groups, the geography of deconstruction, and the messy potentiality in these sense-making endeavors.