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Have Joy: Queer Theory and Mormon Studies

2025; Volume: 12; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.12.07

2156-8030

Peter Coviello,

American History and Culture

The encounter between the archive of Mormonism and the conceptual edifice of queer theory, if it seems in some respects improbable, can feel from other angles nearer to inevitable. It is improbable not least because of the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' devout and, in frequent effect, purgative adherence to the notion of "family" in its very most, as the phrase goes, "traditional" iterations. One can offer counterreadings of "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," one can forage about for uncollapsed spaces for living among its varied addresses to gender as "an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose," and one can dutifully note the church's several recent forays into secular rhetorics of "tolerance."1 Still, nobody would mistake the LDS Church's official stance toward gendered and erotic noncompliance as notably, say, commodious. This is so superabundantly the case that one hardly knows which near-to-hand example to take up. Think only of the now-infamous Proposition 8 campaign of 2008, which dictated that "only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," and into the passage of which the church poured extraordinary quantities of money, organized labor, and pressure. The New York Times headline was curtly correct: "Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage."2Even here, though, are powerful counterindications. Press your ear close enough, and what you will begin to hear, murmuring beneath the surface of these variously codified misgivings in respect to queer life, is nothing other than the Saints' own lingering reputation as, precisely, defilers of the holy sanctity of dyadic marriage and normative family. It's an old story: having been appraised over many decades by their countrymen as the most committed and unblushing deviants—as a population whose strange devotions made them perverts, and whose perversion marked them in turn as seditious, dubiously White, threats to the flourishing of the nation itself—the contemporary LDS Church is by contrast forever giving testament to its own stolid, blameless, exemplary normativity, leveraged now as against those who would allegedly break the mold of traditional family. The ironies here, in these familiar dramas of anxious and invidious distinction, are rich and vivid in themselves, such that one hardly requires the many mass-cultural examples—from Angels in America to Big Love to The Book of Mormon—to recognize how intimately tied Mormon life and queer life have always been, across a clamoring range of scenes.This is part—though, in truth, only a very small part—of what made me want to write and think about the nineteenth-century history of Mormonism and to do so in the key of queer historiography and queer critique. Back in 2019 I published Make Yourselves Gods, whose aim was to provide a large-scale synthesis of two (for me) hugely consequential paradigms: queer theory and postsecular critique.3 Here, I wish to leave the matter of secularism (partly) to one side, and to concentrate on what still seem to me to be the unique affordances of queer theory for scholarly work about the vibrant and turbulent history of the LDS Church.By way of preface, I will say that the matter, for me, is not merely that their fellow Americans regarded the early Saints as erotic deviants in ways neither circumspect nor especially difficult to parse in the grammars of queer critique. Nor is it even that those accusations of defiling perversity were part of a broader delegitimation of the church keyed to racialization—to producing the Latter-day Saints as "Mohammedan" tyrants, "Indian"-like savages, and so forth—though here again queer theory offers us exacting conceptual tools for anatomizing the interweaving of erotic, racial, and devotional life in the disciplinary machinery of secular modernity. All of this is so, and I warmly commend queer theory as a critical idiom that might help you to grasp something of the bedeviling intricacy of these crossed dynamics. (In this, too, I am hardly alone—you might be heartened as well by recent scholarship from Taylor Petrey or K. Mohrman, or by the queerer glimmers visible in pathbreaking works by D. Michael Quinn and even Fawn Brodie, or for that matter by emerging voices like those of Calvin Burke, Adam McLain, and many another dynamizing young scholar in the discipline.4)My larger claim, though, is different, and at least a shade more polemical. It is this: like almost nothing else at all in the realm of critical discourse, queer theory allows us to encounter the theological imagination of Joseph Smith himself in all its breadth, heterodox dynamism, and still-discomfiting wildness. In the scrupulousness of its attention to the dense historicity of our most grounding concepts (like "sex," "family," "the body") and especially in its abiding resistance to the trivializing dismissal of carnal life as a key vector for thought, pleasure, sociability, theology, and much else, queer theory, I want to suggest, grants us access to a Smith considerably stranger, more unorthodox, and more challenging than many following him have quite been ready to believe or receive. If the trove of national commentary on nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints assures you of anything, it is that their Protestant brethren regarded the faithful as, in a word, deviants: as carnally indulgent "dancing Puritans," as "muddy materialists," and above all as licentious pseudo-believers, laboring to conceal private depravity beneath the threadbare cloak of ecclesiastic sanction. Pick your senator or clergyman or scandalized editorialist. A favorite of mine from this salacious archive is an 1855 piece from Putnam's Monthly entitled, with ominous concision, "The Mormons," which makes the claim directly. "Monogamy is sanctioned by our religion," we are told, but goes beyond our religion. . . . It is one of the elementary distinctions—historical and actual—between European and Asiatic humanity. . . . It is one of the pre-existing conditions of our existence as civilized white men. . . . Strike it out, and you destroy our very being; and when we say our, we mean our race—a race which has its great and broad destiny, a solemn aim in the great career of civilization, with which none of us has any right to trifle.5The next year, there was Representative Justin Morrill to amplify the point: "Under the guise of religion, this people has established . . . a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world."6There are innumerable more in exactly this line. Here, then, was a people whose extravagances of devotion were widely understood to have deranged them all at once socially, sexually, and racially, and who accordingly emerged not only as a population dubiously White but, in that "Mohammedan" or "Indian"-like degeneracy, as a species of declining life, requiring at the least the intervention of law, if not measures more nakedly eliminationist. Such strategies ring out from Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs's "extermination order" of 1838 to the sermonizing of one DeWitt Talmage, who declared in 1880, "if the Mormons submit to the law, all right. . . . If that will not do then howitzer, and bombshell, and bullets, and cannon-ball."7None of which sounds especially strange in the ears of students of queer history or queer theory. Persecuting acts of law? Accusations of a civilizational deviance and racializing perversity? Flights of fully genocidal imagination, fueled by the fantasy of a world scrubbed clean of a given people? As Eve Sedgwick long ago noted, such phantasmatics are hardwired into many of even the most seemingly neutral terms of address to queer life (like those orchestrating the "learned" or "born this way" dichotomy, for instance), which is forever being envisioned in the grain of its disappearance, extirpation, prevention.8 Then too, if you are curious about the strikingly interimplicating orders of erotic unorthodoxy and racialization that unfold here, such as would so regularly produce the Latter-day Saints as a population of possibly counterfeited Whiteness, the archive of queer of color critique—from the works of Hortense Spiller and Audre Lorde out through José Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, Riley Snorton, and a great range of others—will provide a keenly responsive set of analytic tools, gauged to precisely these entangled co-articulations.And more: in the case of the Latter-day Saints, we can see as well how just this sort of racializing deviance was persistently read as both cause and effect of a perverting misfiring of devotion—how, in all, the disciplines of secular modernity fused a regulatory scrutiny of religious practice, erotic comportment, and racial status into one another, in an elaborate calculus of value, viability, expendability, and threat. In my own work, and following the lead of scholars like Puar and Kyla Schuller, I name that calculus "the biopolitics of secularism," in a formulation more or less inconceivable without the groundwork of queer theory. Not for nothing, that biopolitical framing, and especially Puar's notion of "homonationalism," does a great deal to clarify the Latter-day Saints' own semi-voluntary transformation across the nineteenth century, as they began to push back against their relegation to the status of expendable life by identifying themselves more and more forcefully with the orders of the racial state, and its cluster of devotional, gendered, and erotic norms.9But there is so much else to the Mormon saga beyond this drumbeat of denigration and counterreaction. The practice of celestial, or patriarchal plural, marriage was only the most scandalizing of Mormonism's forays into social invention; it was hardly the only one. We might recall just as readily the exuberantly lateral sociability that characterized life among the early Saints; or Joseph's own emphatic sacralization of the office of friendship; or the concomitantly striking hydraulics of impassioned male intimacy that suffuse that early Mormon world. It is queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman who enjoins us to observe the "associational" aspects of the early church, where the eager sanctification of bonds beyond the dyadically organized family had the effect of widening the field of social relations not merely tolerated but championed.10 We see the effects of this more horizontalized sociability in so much of the early church, though perhaps nowhere more winningly than in Smith's breezily heretical invocations of friendship—of a sociable ardor structured in ways both nondyadic and extrafamilial—as the very bedrock of Mormon affective existence: "Let me be resurrected with the Saints, whether to heaven or hell or any other good place," he declared in 1843. "What do we care if the society is good?"11 Brigham Young, for one, did not need instruction in the queerer intensities of affect fostered by a sociability thus conceived: "I felt him I slept with him I embraced him and kissed him," Young averred on the tenth anniversary of Smith's death, "drank with him walked with him handled him." So said the man who, riffing on Smith's exaltation of embodied life (of which more soon), reminded the faithful that "our senses, if properly educated, are channels of endless felicity to us."12What do we care if the society is good? If you have any appraising regard for the ecology of nineteenth-century intimate life, scenes such as these are ripe and delectable. They are so not because they disclose the irrefutable presence of sex itself, there at the heart of the early Mormon adventure, either poorly masked or naively misappraised by these blamelessly pre-Freudian players. Far more tellingly, they speak to us from before the hardening-into-solidified place of the familiar taxonomies of modern sex (hetero- and homosexuality are two of the most prominent) had yet produced their sweepingly chastening effects on social intercourse, on the breadth of permitted intensities and ardors in collective, rather than simply dyadic or matrimonial, life. Indeed, one struggles to think of a social group that made more out of these unvoided spaces of intimate possibility, let alone so much adventurous theologizing.I have mentioned the theology of friendship, and the repeated dramas of male intimacy staged around the polygamy revelation, wherein chosen men receive the startling news from Joseph, recoil in moral horror ("Brigham Young claimed it was the first time in his life that he ever desired the grave"13), meditate, pray, and thereafter return to the scene of attachment to the prophet with a still greater intensity, a more impassioned devotion. But we might quite as readily recall the vital and expansive worlds knit into impassioned cohesion by polygamous wives, worlds keyed not solely to their husbands but to one another, and outward from there. A ground-note affect for polygamous women, as Todd Compton does so much to remind us, was loneliness: an isolation in removal from the worlds of disapproving family, social order, entire previous lives. But the other side of this loneliness, as generations of Mormon feminist scholars have made clear, was a commitment to the exalting labors of sociability. It is "the concept of gathering," Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote, that inspirited polygamous wives, that oriented them so vehemently toward one another—I think often of Zina Diantha Young, whose sharpest joys forever arrive in the form of social intercourse and exchange—and toward the larger political and theological worlds of which they were a part.14 The Female Relief Society, where so much civic and also daring theological work transpired, was one especially striking institution built to preserve this impulse toward what Ulrich calls gathering and that, in the key of queer theory, we might call worldmaking.We arrive here, I think, at one of the great clarities of queer studies for the Mormon archive. So much of what queer life entails, and about which queer theory affords a singular articulacy, is the fabulation of vibrant, durable social worlds apart from the given or offhandedly sanctified (as ordered by nuclear family, state, nation, etc.), often accomplished under conditions of great hostility. I think all the time of Lauren Berlant's galvanizing thumbnail description of queer scholarship as rooted in the effort "to focus on patterns of attachment we hadn't even yet known to notice, patterns in which sexuality and intimacy are enacted in a broad field of social relations that anchor us to life." "Being a friend," she says, "a regular, a neighbor, a part-time lover, an ex-lover, an intimate; being gender dysphoric, or just plain gay or straight—all of it is seen as an effect of many causes and a complex, intimate practice of world-building."15 The elaboration and nourishing of social forms aslant the normative, including those lit up by the animating force of desire: when people talk about queer worldmaking, this is some of what they mean: A complex, intimate practice of world-building. Train yourself in these worlds, and in the habits of mind and appraising attention fomented there, and the early Saints' lives will shimmer for you with a new brightness. Taxonomic designation is, in this sense, at least a little beside the point. Call the early Saints queer or don't—analogies have their uses as well as their limitations—but the great Mormon drama of the nineteenth century, with its improvised socialities and countervailing yearnings for inclusion in the normative orders of the racial state, makes for a resonantly queer story.Persecution, fabulation, venturesome worldmaking, proto-homonationalist aspirations to inclusion: all of this vibrates to the chord of queer scholarship. And yet I want to conclude by suggesting that the generative clarities of queer theory take us nearer still not only to the social but the theological enterprise that is early Mormonism. In this vein, consider the proposition that nothing more fully expresses the distinctness and heterodoxy of Smith's counter-Calvinist vision than his insistence that persons were not only not fallen away from God—mired in a fleshly corruption that only a miraculous redemption could unpollute—but were themselves, as living beings in the material world, embryonic gods, assembling lives along a trajectory that ran, with patient inexorability, out toward divinity, timelessness, godhead. As he put it in a dazzling oration from 1844, later called the King Follett Discourse, "You have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods."16A frontal enough directive, if (as Smith would note with frustration) challenging even for the faithful to comprehend. But if exaltation was the fate of humankind, what was forever vouchsafing that indwelling divinity for Smith was the piercing fact that life transpired inside bodies that were themselves already composed of the same material, built of the selfsame stuff, as God. "All spirit is matter," we learn in Doctrine and Covenants, which is to say all that exists—the heavens, the earth, the celestial sphere of angels and gods, whatever is extant—shares for Smith in one contiguous matter (D&C 131:7).17 Arguing thus that all spirit is matter, and further that gods would never suffer the diminishment of existence without embodiment—that God, a sibling human expanded into divinity, is mantled still in a glorious body—Smith again and again labors to make plain to the Saints that nothing conjoins us to the divine, or makes our own incipient godliness more apprehensible, than the living flesh, the bodies we live in and are, through whose through startling capacities we can begin to come at last into the only marginally conceivable knowledge that we ourselves, even now, are gods unenlarged. When Smith declares to the Saints, "the great principle of happiness consists in having a body," or that "Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in his views, and boundless in his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive," or, more famously, that "men are, that they might have joy," this is some of what he wishes the faithful to grasp: that our puzzling and self-reconstituting and pleasure-kindling bodies are not seats of Pauline corruption, not harbingers of our sorrowful fallenness, as centuries of normative Christian misapprehension have conspired to make us believe. They are the vehicles of exaltation.18In these terms, in which we grasp Smith's accumulating cosmology as anchored by a radical theory of embodied life, polygamy itself comes into relief in all its theological multiplicity: as a doctrine rooted in a counter-Calvinist insistence on the incipient divinity of the mortal body; as a quotidian practice, aimed at producing for its participants a kind of denaturalizing counter-discipline, in which one might set to the work of unlearning the accreted misapprehensions of the body (as fallen, polluted, etc.); and, as I put it in Make Yourselves Gods, as an intimate form built explicitly to recognize, rather than rebuke, the pleasures of carnality, inasmuch as those pleasures deliver back to us the good—if only glancingly conceivable—news that not only does life transpire in a world not fallen away from divinity, we ourselves inhabit unfallen flesh, bodies insusceptible to the secular mechanics of disenchantment or reenchantment because from the first coterminous with the flesh of God.19You may be forgiven for not immediately recognizing these as premises central to Smith's thinking, or that polygamy was more than a quirk, a notional appendage to a theology tuned to matters more, say, celestial. To come into contact with these aspects of Smith, one must swim against the tides of centuries of Protestant orthodoxy, as everyone from Fawn Brodie to Terryl Givens to Samuel Morris Brown has made clear. But then one also has to carve a path through the Latter-day Saints' own many and varied defenses of the practice, which, in focusing as relentlessly as they do on either the necessity of a specifically patriarchal restoration (as in earlier accounts) or on the exalted place in it of the reproductive family above all (as in later), persistently diminish, marginalize, or otherwise misappraise everything that makes Smith's a carnal theology, everything in him that rebukes the belittling of embodied life and that attunes us contrarily to the titanic, world-shifting force he locates again and again in that least heralded of theological virtues, pleasure. "This is good doctrine," Smith says in the King Follett Discourse, "It tastes good." And then, astonishingly: You say honey is sweet and so do I. I can also taste the spirit and principles of eternal life, and so can you. I know it is good and . . . you are bound to receive them as sweet. You taste them and I know you believe them.20Call polygamy a "family theology" as much as you wish; I will not even contradict you. I will note only that, in such stridently normalizing frameworks, so much that is inexpugnably central, definitive, and dear to Smith's cosmology sinks into muteness. One loses, perhaps above all, an understanding of Smith as a theologian in love with life, in all its irrepressible and, for him, irreducibly carnal joyousness.By this point, you will not need me to say it: if you want a set of tools to help restore these defining aspects of Smith and to model an unbelittling regard for the importance of pleasure, carnality, the life of the flesh in all its fractious interface with the environing disciplines that frame it, queer theory is there for you. From Foucault on the economy of bodies and pleasure inside any given regime of "sexuality," through the range of psychoanalytically inflected accounts of the undoing and self-disintegrating power of desire (Leo Bersani's are only the most famous), and perhaps supremely in works like Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic," you will encounter an archive attuned to all the body knows: to what it carries and suffers, yes, but also to all it undoes, rewrites, enables, and makes conceivable.21You taste them and I know you believe them. In this precise sense, queer theory stands to my mind as a conceptual archive more responsive and indeed more hospitable to Smith, more exactingly keyed to the most striking and regularly misapprehended particulars of his singular theological imagination, than any other we might name.Such, at any rate, is why I have tried in my own work to bring what I know of queer theory into contact with the kindling and expansive archive of Mormon studies. Those efforts, I feel I can say with some confidence, have been at best preliminary: the opening moves in a sure-to-be larger conversation. There is so much more to be said.