{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019428571428571427, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004571428571428572, 'mean_word_length': 6.008, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Virgin Lands: Gender, Nature, and the Frontier Myth in David Magnusson’s Purity

Abstract This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrangement of narratives and frontier aesthetics invites audiences to attend to the mythic relationship between conquering frontiers and subjugating women’s bodies. Purity represents a subversive deployment of metonymy and enthymeme to infer spectator complicity in the associative connections between frontier mythology and purity culture.