Ex-Plain Queerness: Mediated Being And Becoming Among Gender And Sexually Diverse Amish, German Baptist Brethren, And Mennonites

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Stoltzfus, Lars
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 17, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Hil Malatino, Outside Unit, Field & Minor Member
Matthew Jordan, Major Field Member
Matthew Mcallister, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Patrick Parsons, Major Field Member
Anthony Olorunnisola, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Media Studies
Queer Studies
Transgender Studies
Media and Identity
Amish
Mennonite
Hutterite
Plain People - Abstract:
- This dissertation explores the question of what it means to be queer and/or transgender in a given Plain community––Amish, Amish/Mennonite, German Baptist Brethren, Hutterite, etc.––and how these identities interact with ethnoreligiosity, mediated experiences, religious exit, notions of kinship, and moving through the world as a child and later as an adult. Using José Muñoz's theory of disidentifications, I argue queer and/or trans ex-Plain people utilized media both as a way of disidentifying with the stringent cisheteronormativity of Plain culture and as a way of exploring other ways of being and becoming––essentially, a way of finding new identifications. A crucial tension exists between inter- and intra-Plain discussions about gender and sexual diversity and external English (e.g., any non-Anabaptist/Plain person) stereotypes about what they think Plainness should look like. Plain norms are cisheteronormative, yes, but English norms about Plain norms have a vested interest in using Plain communities as an example of a genetically essentialized cisheteronormative strain of white religiosity. I demonstrate this by conducting a critical discourse analysis of an article from English-created website about Plainness, Amish America, and a queer ex-Amish-created website about Plainness, LGBTAmish. Findings indicate several perspectives: that queer and/or trans Plain people simply do not exist, that they might exist but would either need to keep quiet and not act on their identities or verbalize such identities and contend with the risks of excommunication. These findings create context for the interview chapters in which I talked with gender and sexually diverse ex-Plain people about their own experiences with identity formation and coming to find a sense of self. Respondents, when interviewed about their childhood and adult experiences finding and using media, mentioned strict community norms about educational and entertainment media; gender and sexual norms; and notions of deviance that swirled together for my respondents in such a way that they formulated their very selves as being deviant for not conforming. This led to respondents seeking out and using legacy and new media alike to try and figure out the nature of their difference from their Plain peers even if it meant breaking the rules to find information about queerness. Consuming deviant media became a way of figuring out how the self was deviant, just as much as being told the self was deviant became a way of justifying consuming deviant media. Media became a way to ease disidentifications from cisheteronormative Plainness by providing new narratives, identifications, and ontologies for my respondents during their childhood experiences. These experiences informed and impacted respondents as most of them realized they could only disidentify with a hostile Plain normative status quo so much while still remaining in that community. Experiences with traumatic Plain cisheteronormativity, alternate forms of being illustrated by mediated narratives, and an increasing sense of a queer and/or trans self whose existence is incompatible with Plainness if explicitly and openly claimed led to most of my respondents exiting Plainness in one way or another. I found that after exit, queer and/or trans ex-Plain individuals used media in new ways, learning more about English culture, ontologies of gender and sexual diversity, and the possibilities of kinship networks. Finding identifications is an affordance of media and mediated communities respondents found, especially when they had to disidentify with English culture more broadly speaking due to its radically different formulations of whiteness, gender and sexual diversity, and media. Ultimately, this dissertation found that for queer and/or trans ex-Plain people, media have liberatory potential due to how media and gender and sexual diversity alike are treated as being fundamentally English, sinful, and worldly; if media and self-as-queer are both deviant, then accessing media becomes a 'two wrongs make a right' situation where respondents' disidentifications with Plainness provided justification to at least explore this deviancy. Claiming a queer and/or trans identity as a Plain person is an act of disidentification, and coming out to one's community of origin as being queer and/or trans is an excruciating act. Respondents were torn from their faith, family, geospatial home, livelihood, and futures; however, as ethnoreligious identity is written not only on one's clothing but in one's blood, respondents found themselves moving through media and English culture as ex-Plain, never fully removed from the all-encompassing nature of their communities of origin. Media, then, became ways to find new kinship networks, try on identifications of being and becoming, and even build worlds with other queer and/or trans ex-Plain people whose existence in virtual communities creates completely new ways of imagining and creating identity.