Discourse, interaction, and testimony: The making of selves in the US Protestant dispute over homosexuality

Ethnography helps to elaborate Foucault's conception of power at work to produce subjects through micro-level interactions. I examine interactions among Protestants as they discuss homosexuality in two sites, an ex-gay movement seminar and a pro-gay liberal congregation. In two opposed groups, the genre of testimony produced an authentic-seeming truth, working performatively to produce group boundaries, to legitimate authority and hierarchies in the group, and to tacitly define certain categories as abject, unlivable. That groups can produce this effect in spite of their intentions illustrates how certain forms of social power inhere in language and work through everyday talk.