#Oncegay stories: Exploring social conversion through the Changed Movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper employs a queer intercultural communication framework to analyze the Changed Movement’s website, an evangelical Christian group which claims individuals can change their sexual and gender identities through faith and testimony. I argue that the Changed Movement is a rhetorical site which makes possible a social conversion—one does not need to see a therapist to begin conversion. Changed naturalizes the white cisheterosexual evangelical subject on sociocultural and legal levels in the US nation-state to produce sexualized others that threaten to take the evangelical subject’s place, while employing Pulse shooting survivor testimony to, albeit ambiguously, support that “changed is possible.” Finally, I argue that queer intercultural scholarship must examine evangelical groups like Changed, which construct queer and trans people as subjects to be expelled from the sociocultural and national bodies. These cultural sites are inherently implicated into deeper intersections of power and oppression like whiteness and cisheterosexism.