Are there any Mormons in the history of sexuality? A Response
by Taylor G. Petrey
Photo by Untitled Photo on Unsplash.
Are there any Mormons in the history of sexuality? I’d been puzzling this question long before I ever thought about writing a book on it. At once, Mormonism seemed too provincial, too insignificant to be written into the grand story of modernity. Yet I was pushed to ask the question precisely because of the way that the margins were so often written out of such an official history. Amy Richlin’s critique of Foucault for not including women in his history of sexuality taught me an important lesson about “sins of omission.”[1] Daniel Boyarin’s pointed question, “Are there any Jews in the history of sexuality?,” also revealed how adding new material might complement and complicate the analysis of tectonic shifts.[2] What I hope that Tabernacles of Clay and Peter Coviello’s phenomenal Make Yourselves Gods might contribute further is not only a resounding YES in answer to the opening question but as further examples of how playing with center and periphery might reframe normative histories altogether.
I find it interesting to think about these two books as overlapping in a number of important ways that mutually inform one another, as well as asking slightly different questions that lead in different directions. It is clear that both are working from a Foucaultian perspective, historicizing sexuality, folding that into a broader project of modernization, and picking up more explicitly on post-Foucaultian developments that pay attention to the mutual entanglement of sexuality with race. And of course both see queer theory as a useful and necessary analytic lens from which to squint at the Mormon archive.
At the same time, these two recent treatments diverge in where they choose to focus their analysis and what trajectory of Foucaultian thought they tease out. Coviello follows the line of biopolitics, the power of the state to shape and discipline bodies and practices, and especially picks up on Talal Asad’s analytical trajectory that traces the rise of secularism in an analogous and interconnected way to the rise of sexuality. Secularism and sexuality transform earlier “religious” idioms into supposedly non-religious ones, which nevertheless betray their rootedness to religion by disciplining religion into acceptable forms. Coviello uses this insight to answer how Mormons became both white and monogamous, and what was the cost of such a transition. I follow a slightly different path in the Foucaultian legacy that picks up on the ontologies of sexual difference as the central question, primarily via Judith Butler. Not that this is opposed to other trajectories, and in fact I think that they are complementary in instructive ways, but still the emphasis is different. My approach focuses less on the state as a locus of biopower and more on the discourses, nodes of power-knowledge, and the micro levels of disciplinary technique and technologies of power. I use this to answer the question of how Mormons became heterosexual, and what was the cost of such a transition.
The excellent roundtable panelists accentuate yet another line of the Foucaultian legacy that Coviello and I each incorporate in different ways, one that is attuned to the intersection of race and sexuality as co-constitutive categories. The story of how Mormons became “white” through the practice of normative monogamous sexuality is at the heart of Coviello’s narrative. My own examination of a later period looks at how Mormons staked a claim to whiteness through sexual boundaries and shared discourses of “purity” between race and gender.
Each of the panelists extends this analysis in key ways. Heather White’s excellent insights reveal a central problematic at the heart of the intersection between sexuality and race, exposing how “whiteness” hides itself as unmarked. When race only appears to recede as a category of analysis in the era of “colorblindness,” how might we expose its continued operation? “In what ways, that is, should scholars analyze race in the face of its seeming absence as a category?” The answer to this question in White’s essay is to train our attention on the “discursive unmarking of a white racial standpoint.” Rather than seeing discourses of heterosexuality as replacing now-absent discourses of race, White suggests that heterosexuality comes to stand in as a continuation of white racial superiority by other means. This is an essential reframing.
Edgar Garcia’s interrogation about the angel Moroni’s body demonstrates, again, how racial projects are shot through Mormonism. The cosmologies of race that governed Mormon texts and perspectives, especially those focused on indigenous Americans, call us to pay attention to the different conceptions of race that are operative in Mormon frameworks of indigeneity. Garcia reminds us that bodies can induce panic, especially when they intermingle and transgress normative categories. More importantly, Garcia points to a bigger story about Mormonism beyond the provincial North American focus in my own work. Altering us to the Mayan Mormons’ own cosmologies and confluences with their cultural vistas about history, race, colonialism, and the future, we become aware of an entirely new lens for situating Mormonism in a grand sweep of modernity—especially in its coloniality.
K. Mohrman brings our attention to the early twentieth century, a period in Mormon history that falls precisely between the nineteenth-century narrative of Coviello and my own, which begins after World War II. This isn’t merely a period that we both inadvertently neglected in the stories we independently told, but one that Mohrman demonstrates offers an instructive link between Mormonism and the emergence of modern LGBT identities—a connection often obscured by the stubborn secularity of histories of sexuality. This question seems crucial: “what has been lost in a less-than-attentive and less-than-critical approach to religion in the history of sexuality?” Distortion and the unconscious perpetuation of normative stereotypes are certainly outcomes of such a tradition. But the relevance to more expansive perspectives about religion shows once again the centrality of race in the history of sexuality. A necessary clarification, Mohrman points to larger issues around sexual and gender normativity, including reminding us of the ways that white supremacy was reinvented in sexual and gender norms, as White notes. But this work also calls scholars to look beyond the provincialism of US-centered studies, as Garcia notes.
Are there any Mormons in the history of sexuality? Hopefully the recent studies have shown that the history of sexuality seems not just to have happened to Mormons, as passive actors in the background of some grand stage. It would be an exaggeration to say that they are the primary protagonists, as much as their importance in the nineteenth century defines key sexual and racial boundaries. But their stories also teach us something about this history, raising new questions, providing new answers, and updating old paradigms. And such histories will continue to be refined. The future of the history of sexuality hopefully includes more of this.
[1] Amy Richlin, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory For Women?,” in Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, eds. David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 138–170.
[2] Daniel Boyarin, “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 333–355.
Taylor G. Petrey is an associate professor of religion and chair of the religion department at Kalamazoo College. He holds a ThD from Harvard Divinity School. Petrey is a scholar of religion and gender studies with numerous books and articles on these topics. Most recently, he is the author of Tabernacles of Clay: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Mormonism and co-editor with Amy Hoyt of The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender. You can follow him on Twitter @TaylorPetrey.