Doing It: A Rhetorical Autoethnography of Religious Masturbation and Identity Negotiation

My sexual liberation did not occur until well into my twenties, post bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Between the temporal space of my first sexual experience and liberation is a moment of spiritual identity negotiation within an intraracial relationship with vast intercultural differences, specifically class and religion. In this autopoetic narrative that begins and ends in a church, I tell a story from my sexual past that troubles what it means to engage in religion as a whole body and negotiate the tensions of sin, class, and race.