At the unlikely confluence of conservative religion and popular culture:fight clubas heteronormative ritual

We argue that, in campaigning against homosexuality, political and religious conservatives benefit from the familiarizing heteronormative discourse of the very culture against which they have declared war. To illustrate, we offer an analysis of David Fincher's Fight Club in which we show how the film's narrative is structured around a quasireligious ritual that reaffirms heterosexuality at the expense of homosexuality. This ritual, informed by Freud's Oedipal myth, takes the form of a tripartite rite of passage that provides the film's core audience temporary liminal license to explore the homoerotic attraction that lies just beneath the film's celebration of homosocial bonding.