Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

No Queers Here

2022; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.9.1.06

2156-8030

Kathryn Lofton,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Taylor G. Petrey'sTabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism uses a word that has an activist past and an electric capacity. This is a word also worn out by its bandying; it is a word perhaps nearing retirement. That word is queer.Tabernacles of Clay is not a book about queer life. It is not a book with any people who call themselves queer, or think within the traditions of queer political activism, or who articulate feelings of queer temporality, queer kinship, or queer emplacement. It is not a book written in a queer way or arguing for new methods for queer epistemology. But it is a book that, for its author, needs queer thought to exist. Thinking about what this term is doing for Petrey and for his description of gender in modern Mormonism focuses what follows. I begin with trepidation and complicity: it is not simple to observe that how a scholar uses a word is dissatisfying, and any criticism mounted should include the critic as subject to it.The bulk of Petrey's book offers a series of examples to illustrate how senior leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—all of them, as he acknowledges, older, male, White, straight-identified—shaped the gendered ideas of that community since 1945. Petrey offers an effective sketch of how Latter-day Saint leadership interpreted the shifting landscape of gender of the last seventy years as a kind of discursive obstacle course to arrive, friendly-like, at the right heterosexual family. Petrey wants to capture the polemical thrust of a tradition managed by high-level male bureaucrats who speak and engage laity with great consciousness of the effect of their speech. He knows this is not a social history of domestic life, an ethnography of sexual practice, or a theorizing work about gender and ecclesiology. It is a run-down of the available record of comment by apostles, members of the First Presidency, and Brigham Young University presidents, showing just how hard Mormon leadership worked to make sure Mormons were never confused about the kind of sex they were supposed to have or what person they were supposed to grab onto, ritually, for it.Petrey's research leads him to organize his chapters around the Latter-day Saint “areas of activity” regarding gender (2). These areas of activity are the production of preaching campaigns, and related teaching curriculum, about sexual purity, gender roles, and marriage; the development of new institutions to propagate psychological techniques to cure homosexuality; and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage. Although the latter sociopolitical interventions are how Mormons most prominently appeared in the public sphere, Petrey makes clear such electoral and legislative engagement was a slow coming out for a community that, for a significant portion of the twentieth century, just wanted to blend in. Mormons only began to broadcast their homophobia once they could sense they had synchronized their sensibilities with the very bloc that long burnt them at the figurative stake—namely, White evangelicals. Evangelicals and Mormons were old enemies now friends with new enemies: queers and the women and men they made messily less-so with their seductive talk of gender nonconformity.“Areas of activity” is an apt classification of a community enraptured with a wholly de-sexed metaphor of the beehive. It also roots the book in the perspective of Mormon leadership. This is a book not only about Mormon leaders and what they do, but one that also models, in its narrative focus, the uncontested discursive vacuum in which church bureaucracies can function, especially in academic thinking about them. Any occupant of a bureaucracy—church, commercial, legal, academic—knows what a true mess it is, filled with confusions about the very rules its agents are charged to uphold and held captive to micro-dramas about desk placement and what Amanda Lucia describes as the “haptic logics” of physical movements between hierarchized individuals.1 Which is only to say that it seems likely to this reviewer that, internal to the church, there may have been contestation and personal equivocation, even abruption, in the development of a smoothed sexual profile for modern Mormons, but Tabernacles of Clay does not record such conflict. We do not hear about who might be pulling on the leaders or what social realities specifically influenced their thinking. This is a discursive history of institutional activity. A lot of words, and a lot of campaigns about words, referring to people figured as dangerous to keep other words on the up and up (or straight and narrow).What I am trying to convey is that this is a study of gender and sex that has none of either. This seems like an absence that would very much please the LDS Church and its leaders. But I wondered how Petrey thought about sex and gender himself as he worked through these archives of gender recommendation and sexual assignment.Speaking for myself, I am not unique among my dyke brethren in possessing a rather chatty and very scrutinizing relationship to sex lives and gendered practices. Because I am fearful I will be sniffed out and wounded for my own, I try to beat the speaker at their game and think about the subtext they are smothering as prep for possible attack. But this is me. When I read that by the late 1950s, church leaders “increasingly worried that homosexuality was a growing problem in need of a solution,” I wonder about why they started to worry; about who were their friends, or children of friends, or rumor-mongers about friends, that made this growth apparent (64). To be clear, I do not assume there was a lot of secret sex happening that the church would call “homosexual.” I assume calling someone a “homo” in the 1950s was an effective way to ruin someone's life, and there are one hundred reasons people might want to ruin someone's life that have nothing to do with the sex they are, or are not, having. Especially in a labyrinthine fraternity of men competing to get the right girl or win a game on the basketball court or just win friends and influence people, intimating someone was queer may have been a helpful strategic weapon to neutralize another contestant.Petrey does not toy in such speculative thinking. He mentions that in 1959, the best-selling (and Pulitzer Prize–winning) book Advise and Consent depicted a Mormon US senator as a clandestine homosexual, but he does not make much of that fiction or how, generally, Mormon men were perceived in the mid-twentieth-century US. Instead, Tabernacles of Clay describes the argumentative, therapeutic, and political efforts Mormons made in the fields of gender when they began to so worry about sex. This leaves the queer reader with a powerful pummeling experience of the church's activism against them, and indeed almost any minority community the church can surveil. I use the word “pummeling” intentionally. Despite having read a great many histories of sexuality in the US, rarely have I read one that records so much vitriol for gay people. Despite having worked within multiple homophobic bureaucracies, I still found myself worn thin. What does a reader learn by reminding herself how repugnant a church finds her to be?I learned other things from the historical journey, certainly. Because of Petrey's work, I have learned anew that Latter-day Saint leadership wholeheartedly endorsed racial segregation. Joseph Fielding Smith, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught that “the modern prohibition on interracial marriage had its basis in biblical narrative and Mormonism's revealed doctrine” (25). To be clear, Mormon leaders were not sweating if non-White races mixed up. As college president Owen J. Cook explained: “The Brethren were not concerned if a Tongan married a Maori or a Samoan married a Hawaiian. . . . Those types of marriages did not concern the Brethren, but the Caucasian did” (29). Policing White people from having sex, or just going to school, with Black people is something the church only slowly ceased to do. Utah was, in 1963, the second to last state in the West to overturn the state's anti-miscegenation statute. When the 1978 revelation about Black priesthood occurred, many Mormons observed it “flatly contradicted past authoritative teachings on racial purity and lacked convincing precedent” (48). Petrey makes clear: they are correct.For Petrey, the point is not to tell a history of Mormonism and race but to trace how race informed sexual options in modern Mormonism. The main thrust of the book's remaining chapters tracks how much Mormon discourse wanted certain kinds of women and men and worried the church could not get them without a lot of instruction. After World War II, Mormon leaders agreed with broader national calls by conservatives for a new American home founded on male hierarchy. Women were told to exercise, avoid swearing, be mindful of their looks, and develop a “pleasing personality.” In a striking understatement, Petrey observes, “In emphasizing women's work as homemaking and their duties to please their husbands, these curricular changes designated an increasingly narrow scope of women's place in society and the church” (39).Men did not evade scrutiny, as fears of homosexuality drove men to double down on their masculine assurance and performance of sturdy professionalism. “Delinquent male leadership and sexual deviance were inextricably linked,” suggesting that if you stumbled in your church duties you could get a squinting suspicion that your lost ward paperwork might mean you had developed an inappropriate desire (53). Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth President of the church, was especially devoted to rooting out homosexuality and argued that masculine self-mastery could be trained. It must be trained because, as Kimball explained in The Miracle of Forgiveness, same-sex relationships were “revolting,” “detestable,” “ugly,” and “repugnant” (70). Here the relationship between sexuality and gender is on full display. Apostle Boyd K. Packer conveys here what Petrey argues is the general Latter-day Saint view, namely that everybody is at risk of being homosexual, and the Mormon response to this fungibility is to keep an eye on the gender-mastery prize. “You must protect yourself,” Packer said. “No one is locked into that kind of life . . . There is no mismatching of bodies and spirits. Boys are to become men—masculine, manly men—ultimately to become husbands and fathers. No one is predestined to a perverted use of these powers” (88). Mormon psychologists propagated a therapeutic belief in a “true, inner heterogender.” Deviations from this heterogender were pathological missteps. Correcting gender performances was the key to unlocking the “true” interior gender (96). Mixed-sex marriage was the primary practice that would ensure the acquisition of a “heterogender.” In 1962 BYU decided not to admit any student who they had “convincing evidence is a homosexual” (64). “Homosexuality” was formally added to the list of excommunicable offenses in the LDS Church in 1968.In the 1970s and 1980s, Mormon treatment of homosexuality presupposed that it was best understood as a failure of a proper understanding of gender norms, that heterosexuality was the “normal” condition of human beings, and that homosexuality was a deviation from that norm. Petrey describes how the LDS Church never simply opposed homosexuality or gender nonconformity. Rather, it used these deviations to reiterate the right relations it hoped people would practice. So, the church simultaneously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment—as Rodney Turner wrote in his 1972 book Woman and the Priesthood, “No woman can fully identify with the work-a-day world of men and escape unmarked”—and advanced a more egalitarian doctrine of marriage (111). Petrey reflects what decades of Mormon studies scholarship has assessed: “Mormons did not simply reject social change but accommodated and adapted to it” (137).Getting Mormon wives a more equal say in their marriages required cutting queer people further down to size. “Heterosexuality ascended over patriarchy as the defining Mormon doctrine of marriage and family,” Petrey writes (139). When, in the 1990s, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex marriages amounted to sex discrimination, the LDS Church heard that ruling as an ecumenical mating call. It scrambled to develop alliances with Catholic and evangelical grassroots organizations to get state amendments passed that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. Senior apostle Boyd K. Packer understood the battle against homosexuality to be a battle for the future of the church and its children. He diagnosed homosexuality as an insidious practice, comparing homosexual intercourse as a crime equal to incest and “the molesting of little children of either gender” (157). Church leaders introduced new doctrines that made same-sex sexual intimacy one of the most serious sins for Latter-day Saint leaders. Tabernacles of Clay proves indisputably that the central political drama of twentieth-century religious organizations was not their relationship to the state but to their idea of right gender expression.Petrey does not just want to describe all the “areas of activity” in which the church operated to manage gender. He also wants to explain those activities. This is how the language of queer, and specifically “queer theorists,” enters a book that otherwise reads as handbook to homophobic politics. For Petrey, turning to queer theorists allows him to account for the elements of “fluidity and malleability” he sees as preponderant in church writings about gender (15). “Mormons did not adopt notions of sexual essentialism or a ‘two-sex’ ontology,” Petrey summarizes, “but advocated an ontology of malleability and fluidity to explain the world as they experienced it” (222). Mormon leaders developed a theory about sexuality that competed with emerging popular bimodal accounts of gender essentialism. “Mormonism resisted and subverted the notions of the essential sexual subject and relied on a model of asexual difference that held that the barrier between male and female was fragile and permeable” (223). In that difference, Latter-day Saint gender theorizing seems, to Petrey, kin with things queer theorists espouse.The revelation of this research, for Petrey, is that in Mormon writings, “there is no ‘being’ to gender, only its ‘becoming’ through regulated norms” (222). Petrey points to the writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, who argued that “the primal element of human beings was essentially ungendered.” Fielding Smith developed a soteriology in which being without gender was to “occupy a lower state of existence” (45). Practicing Mormonism, therefore, meant practicing gender. Petrey's excitement about this interpretive strand is palpable. “Whether in the Proclamation [on the Family] or other preaching, when the church leaders appealed to nature and essentialism,” he asserts, “they were making normative claims about what ought to be, not descriptive claims about an ontology of sexual difference” (140). Petrey sees in twentieth-century Mormon thought about gender a striking commitment to gender as “open to vulnerability and change” (209). As he writes: In the traditional history of sexuality, heterosexuality and homosexuality jointly emerged as fixed identities in modernity. Queer theorists have objected to this modernist characterization of sexuality, historicizing and relativizing these categories and embracing fluidity, ambiguity, and performativity instead. But Mormonism does not fit neatly into this traditional history of sexuality. Instead, Mormon leaders also sought for relativity, ambiguity, and especially malleability to explain the fragility of heterosexual desires. The prescribed cure for gender failure was to perform heterosexuality and heteronormative gender roles. (103)There is much to be said about this passage, but what is most important to underline is that I could feel, really feel, Petrey's enthusiasm in these moments. He has figured something out that for him is also the way out of Mormon homophobia. Yes, “homosexuality became the ultimate threat of gender fluidity and its most prevalent expression” (52). But also “gender fluidity was not something to be avoided entirely but something that could be strategically harnessed” (55). That it was, in Mormonism, normally harnessed to heal the homo and make sure mom was always pleasing is the headline. But the internal logics of gender theorizing, for Petrey, make Mormonism more mutable than fixed.The latter is not something Petrey ever precisely says, but I take it to be the source of his queer theory glee. At least, that is what explains to me why something so widely known in the study of religion—namely, religions develop gendered practices; those practices usually presuppose gender is not fixed but performed—can be so thrilling to behold. “I am arguing that the concept of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to dominate the structure of Mormon teachings about gender and sexuality in the period since World War II—eventually eclipsing racial and patriarchal teachings—I also want to underscore the dramatic changes that these categories have themselves undergone,” Petrey writes (216). He wants to underscore these dramatic changes because it shows that those Mormon performances of gender that may seem stable or fixed have, in his words, “actually been open to dramatic changes. Latter-day Saint teachings about marriage, gender roles, sexual difference, and sexuality have undergone remarkable transformation since World War II. The teachings and practices of the LDS Church in the early twenty-first century would already be unrecognizable to Mormon leaders in the mid-twentieth century” (213). Petrey and I could reasonably debate his repeated use of “dramatic change” to describe a church that still, as of this writing, does not allow trans people temple access and that hopes homosexuality will be healed in the next life (and certainly does not want it among the First Presidency in this one). I can cede dramatic change transpired if Petrey cedes that dragooning queer theory into the causal explanation is a bit, well, opportunistic.Of relevance here is not precisely the intellectual facts of gender, queer, and feminist theory but the reason for their appearance in a book on twentieth-century Mormon gender politics that makes no pretense of being interested in queer people or queering the non-queers that form its documentary focus.2 Again, I think Petrey's intention is to employ queer theorizing as the intellectual grounds to describe “gender and sexuality as persistently marked by ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction, and paradox” (223). But this is like saying the word totalitarian describes an authority that is controlling. It is true, but that does not nearly capture its right usage's bite. “‘Queer,’ if useful, stands for those against whom dominant social understandings of the normative develop,” writes Linn Tonstad.3 There is no doubt that queer theorists have had reason to doubt whether this word can retain its power to stand against. As Sharon Marcus observed in 2005: Queer has been the victim of its own popularity, proliferating to the point of uselessness as a neologism for the transgression of any norm (queering history, or queering the sonnet). Used in this sense, the term becomes confusing, since it always connotes a homosexuality that may not be at stake when the term is used so broadly. Queerness also refers to the multiple ways that sexual practice, sexual fantasy, and sexual identity fail to line up consistently. That definition expresses an important insight about the complexity of sexuality, but it also describes a state experienced by everyone. If everyone is queer, then no one is—and while this is exactly the point queer theorists want to make, reducing the term's pejorative sting by universalizing the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power.4Universalizing the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power. The simplest thing I could observe is that Tabernacles of Clay contributes to this depletion. The more aggressive thing I could say is that it cynically deploys a category to signal affinity for the very subjects the book's central cast works aggressively to harm.“We must do more than call attention to ways theory is misused,” bell hooks has written. “We must actively work to call attention to the importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed feminist movements, particularly highlighting that theory which seeks to further feminist opposition to sexism, and sexist oppression. Doing this, we necessarily celebrate and value theory that can be and is shared in oral as well as written narrative.”5 As I reflected on Tabernacles of Clay and its invocation of queer, I thought about my imperfect record of throwing around high-wattage words. Of particular regret is how, early in my writings on consumer culture, I leaned on the term neoliberal without developing a strong sensibility for its specific economic history in the Global South. When I review the especially wince-inducing passages where I deployed the term, I perceive that I used neoliberal in anger, wanting to insult something inchoate I hated and also wanting to seem cool, like I knew something other people did not. You are the sucker, the neoliberal; I'm the wit with heavy words.The work of unlearning is harder than the work of learning. I have no doubt Petrey thought it was a compliment to queer theory and maybe even to queers that he allies his analysis in solidarity with them. But what we need is not signaling. We need solutions to the violence that seems ever to find a new population to troll. Tabernacles of Clay does not provide this. We are not asked to think about why, specifically, the LDS Church tilted conservatively across the twentieth century, nor are we taught what might presage its decision-making around new horizons of gendered understanding. The reader learns that Mormons believe gender is malleable, but this provides no more useful warning to its most fragile subjects than that the elder White men in charge will decide when and where you, queer, will be safe. When a mother of a transgender child asked Apostle Dallin H. Oaks if the church would shun her for supporting that child, Oaks replied: “This question concerns transgender, and I think we need to acknowledge that while we have been acquainted with lesbians and homosexuals for some time, being acquainted with the unique problems of the transgender situation is something we have not had so much experience with, and we have some unfinished business in teaching on that” (198). While Tabernacles of Clay marvels at the dramatic changes the LDS Church has made, a trans person in Provo or in Lima or in Perth waits, with no small fear, to see what violence will accompany their church as it makes their acquaintance.