About
Hunting
Unicorns
Welcome to our project and thank you for your interest. Here we will discuss our aims and strategies. This project aims to seek multiple perspectives. While our personal experience is guiding our initial research, we welcome all viewpoints to broaden our understanding of this topic.
Please be advised, this topic covers material some may find distressing.
Aims
Hunting Unicorns is a project that intends to explore the effects of Fundamentalist Christian attitudes in the United States on adolescents. We feel the best ways to explore this topic is to encourage people raised in these communities to tell their stories. We understand that this is a large ask, therefore we want to create methods to safely and ethically encourage people to tell their story with as much creative control as possible. We also want to create a platform in which these stories can be shared to help people suffering from religious inspired trauma and to raise awareness of these issues.
We do not believe that these communities mean harm to their children. Nor do we seek to deter people from their faith. Rather, we believe that these religious communities are operating on disinformation and misinformation that informs them that these harsh standards are ultimately beneficial to their children.
Context
In the United States over the past two decades concerns have risen around Fundamentalist Christian practices around child rearing which often leads to individuals experiencing extreme cases of mental, physical, spiritual, and sexual abuse. Children raised in these communities grow up with a greatly diminished sense of self, an inability to express themselves, and a lack of formal education to effectively navigate the world outside the community, leaving them to feel living with this abuse is the only viable option.
"The techniques of the self, have been embedded either in some authoritarian or disciplinary structure... Which play a formative role in our attitude to the other and ourselves. The culture of the self is now imposed on people by the other and the culture of the self has lost its independence." - Michel Foucault
Foucault, Michel, ‘The Culture of the Self’ (unpublished Lecture, 1983) <https://www.openculture.com/2014/08/michel-foucaults-lecture-the-culture-of-the-self.html> [accessed 9 March 2024]
Why
Unicorns?
Celtic Mythology depicts the Unicorn as a fierce animal that represents the power of creation, often depicted as female or feminine. The introduction of Christian Ideology in northern Europe appropriated the Unicorn into tales where the creature must be hunted, captured or killed to make use of its magic, usually by a King. There is only one way to catch a Unicorn, you must lure out the Unicorn with a virgin, another “pure” creature. The Unicorn lies next to the virgin and rests leaving it vulnerable.
In other words, the unicorn can only be caught if it is betrayed by something it trusts. While this may not be the intent of the parents, we see a link to what is happening to children growing up in these communities. They are being betrayed to a system intent on using their power for it's own purpose at the cost of the child's freedom.
Image Gallery
The Influence of the imagry is based off of a tapestry set called "Hunt of the Unicorn" (French: La Chasse à la licorne) is a series of seven tapestries made in the South Netherlands around 1495–1505, and now in The Cloisters in New York. They were possibly designed in Paris and show a group of noblemen and hunters in pursuit of a unicorn through an idealized French landscape.
