Waging War in Wild Wild Country: Regulating Sex and Nation in Osho’s Rajneeshpuram
摘要
This chapter considers Wild Wild Country (2018), a six-part Netflix documentary series focused on Rajneeshpuram, a short-lived utopian experiment in radical sexual liberation, therapeutic processing, spiritual awakening, and hard manual labor, which was founded by the Indian guru Osho/Bhagwan Rajneesh (1981–1985). Herein, I read Wild Wild Country as one mythological account alongside and in conversation devotional memoirs of lives lived at Rajneeshpuram, which supply an archive of competing myths and perspectives. Such triangulated reading sheds light on the ideological fracture between two communities featured in Wild Wild Country, that of conservative, white, rural, Christians Americans and the libertine, urban, global elites and their Indian guru. I build on the theoretical contributions of Megan Goodwin, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to demonstrate that the conflict between the Rajneeshees and the local Oregonians demands an intersectional approach to understand how “contraceptive nationalism” (Goodwin 2020) constructs the nation by policing boundaries around race, class, religion, and sexuality simultaneously. In their xenophobia, the Oregonians justified their ousting of the Rajneeshees by invoking the purity of the nation as constituted by white, Christian, heterosexual, and ‘hard-working’ middle classes, and by establishing a corresponding fabricated relation between Indianness, Satanism, illegitimate (non-procreative) sex, wealth, and foreign predation.