Gay Conversion Practices in Memoir, Film and Fiction

Gay Conversion Practices in Memoir, Film and Fiction
Author: James E. Bennett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350289841

For over half a century, organizations and individuals promoting ex-gay, conversion and/ or reparative therapy have pushed the tenet that a person may be able to, and should, alter their sexual orientation. Their so-called treatments or therapies have taken various forms over the decades, ranging from medical (including psychiatric or psychological) rehabilitation approaches, to counselling, and religious healing. Gay Conversion Practices in Memoir, Film and Fiction provides an in-depth exploration of the disturbing phenomenon of gay conversion 'therapy' and its fictional and autobiographical representations across a broad range of films and books such as But I'm a Cheerleader! (1999), This is What Love in Action Looks Like (2011) and Boy Erased (2018). In doing so, the volume emphasizes the powerful role the arts and media play in communicating stories around conversion practices. Approaching the timely and urgent subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, contributors utilize film theory, queer theory, literary theory, mental health and social movement theory to discuss the medicalization and pathologizing of queer people, the power of institutions ranging from church, psychiatry and family (sometimes in alliance), and the real and fictional voices of survivors.

Converting Fiction

Converting Fiction
Author: David H. Darst
Publisher: Unc Department of Romance Studies
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN:

This study examines the many ways in which seventeenth-century Spanish authors manipulated the expected outcomes of secular literature to create religiously motivated endings prompted by some kind of conversion. In the late sixteenth century, the prevalent technique was to transform the secular material entirely, a lo divino. After 1598, however, writers developed the ingenious procedure of ostensibly following a secular account of events but subverting it by inserting an unanticipated religious ending. The specific kinds of conversion at closure examined here are the appropriation of earlier genres; conversion of non-Christian literary types; personal conversion of the native Spaniard through the Catholic ritual of confession, penitence, and absolution; conversion of the nation's historical material; and conversion of the very landscape upon which Christians walk in their pilgrimage through life.

Converting Kate

Converting Kate
Author: Beckie Weinheimer
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2007
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780670061525

After moving from Arizona to Maine, sixteen-year-old Kate tries to recover from her father's death as she resists her mother's dogmatic religious beliefs and attempts to find a new direction to her life.

The Convert

The Convert
Author: Elizabeth Robins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1908
Genre:
ISBN:

Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s

Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s
Author: A. Markley
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Dramatically expanding the boundaries of the British “Jacobin” novel, Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s analyzes the works of a wide range of British reformists writing in the 1790s, including William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Maria Edgeworth, who reshaped the conventions of contemporary fiction to position the novel as a progressive political tool. Rather than aiming to launch a bloody revolution, these authors worked to initiate social and political reform in such areas as women’s rights, abolition, the Jewish question, and the leveling of the class system in Britain by converting the individual reader, one reader at a time.