Sacra/mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Entirely woven through with elements that are imaginary, erotic, effective, corporal, sensual, and so on, [the church] is superb! —Michel Foucault, “On Religion” (1978) As Michel Foucault has taught us, modern West- ern culture’s way of bundling desires, fantasies, acts, and object choices into a kind of person, the homosexual, has its roots in a reli- gious ritual—the confession (see Foucault 1990, especially 58–63). But if for Foucault sexuality runs along a track from confession booth to closet, the American context suggests other routes. The work of Americanist scholars such as Peter Coviello, John Mac Kilgore, and Molly McGarry has clarified the ways that ecstatically embodied belief practices in the United States—nondominant religions from Native American spirituality to Mormonism to the “science” of Spiritualism— refuse to accede to the techniques whereby acts become identities through the medium of speech. 1 Yet this work inspires me to ask: what of Catholicism itself, a minority religion in the United States? To what extent is Catholic liturgical practice (not always equivalent to Roman Catholic theology) actually much more “catholic” about bodies, desires, fantasies, and affinities than the dominant Protestant worldview of the New England colonies and eventually the United States, and in ways that contest the regime of modern sexuality? What was the confession originally a part of, and did the power relations in which it was once embedded all give way to modern sexuality, or might there be remain- ders that indicate otherwise? Elizabeth Freeman American Literature, Volume 86, Number 4, December 2014 DOI 10.1215/00029831-2811730 © 2015 by Duke University Press American Literature Published by Duke University Press