Soulforce Symposium: Paper on Building the Counter Movement

Over this past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Soulforce Symposium on "The Truth About Faith, Love, Science, and Reparative Therapy" as a presenter. I was asked to present a paper on the intersectionality panel on building an inclusive movement centered on intersectional justice. The Symposium was a great time for folks to come together and have deeper conversions through multiple lenses about the violence and harm produced by the 'ex-gay' movement.

Download my paper titled "Critical Witnessing and Multilingualism: Building the Counter Movement" at from the Soulforce website.




Lately in my work on the 'ex-gay' movement,  I have been responding to the theologies, ideologies, and practices of reparative therapy by turning to post-colonial and post-structuralist convictions as a way to denaturalize the ways homosexuality and gender variance gets termed 'disordered' and in need of treatment.  Essentially what this does to the 'ex-gay' movement is label it as a violent, colonial project that annihilates a specific population. The Symposium worked well to help me flesh out some of these ideas and arguments. The ideas and arguments presented at the conference all centered around this theme of exposing the pain and violence inflicted by reparative therapy.

My paper examined how do build a counter movement. Drawing on post-colonial, post-strucuralist queer Chicana/o feminist ideologies, I produced a response to the idea of building an inclusive movement. My paper is titled, "Critical Witnessing and Multilingualism: Building the Counter Movement" and is available for download on the Soulforce website. To provide background, the panelists were asked to respond to the following passage from Read My Lips by Rikki Wilchins:

"Our contradictions and differences are more than political obstacles; they are reminders of our boundlessness, confirmations that we can never be fully captured or circumscribed, that no label or movement can ever hope to encompass all we are or have to be. And that diversity is our strength in the face of the familiar, tyrannical Western project to impose the monolithic, all-enveloping truths that marginalized, suppressed and erased us in the first place…we need an inclusive movement that is committed to making connections across the boundaries for our common good…but for that we need to trust each other, we need to refuse to marginalize our own minorities" (Wilchins, 1997)