Testimony and sharing of the sensitive in Pray Away

This article analyzes the documentary Pray Away, dedicated to denouncing the practices of "conversion therapy" groups for LGBTQIA+ people, and investigates how testimonies of "healing" and conversion — in which subjects recount the passage from a past of "sin" to supposed heterosexual normality — function as instruments of legitimization of a normative order about the body and desire. We use Jacques Rancière's concepts of police and politics as the central reference of this article and argue that such testimonies operate as police devices, producing the sharing of what can be heard, seen and socially legitimized, while ruptures in the normative narrative — such as when former leaders of these groups break the silence and expose the violence of the conversion process — configure political moments capable of reconfiguring the limits of the sensible.