ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of “purity porn”, a label that groups together 21st-century factual media which spectacularises and others the Evangelical Christian purity movement, and in particular its father-daughter purity balls. Purity balls are formal dinner-dance events held across the US and attended by fathers and daughters, during which girls pledge to remain abstinent until marriage; the events draw heavily on the symbolism and rituals of the spectacular white wedding. Using Freud’s (1955) notion of the uncanny, this chapter focuses on documentaries, Cutting Edge’s “The Virgin Daughters” (2008) and Virgin Tales (2013) and the photography monograph Purity (Magnusson 2014), to critically analyse the ways in which, in purity porn, the purity ball’s relationship to the white wedding becomes familiarly unfamiliar. The effect is a making uncanny that which is hiding in plain sight in the wedding spectacle: the virginal white bridal gown, the youthfulness of the princess-bride, the proprietary relationship between father and daughter, and the transaction from the bride’s father to the husband. As such purity porn invites an uneasy confrontation with the problematic heteropatriarchal aspects of the white wedding spectacle which persist today.
