By J StuartAugust 26, 2022
K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
I haven’t read a book as historiographically disruptive to Mormon Studies as K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism. Covering 1830 to the present, it covers a much longer period than most monographs on Mormonism. In addition to a longer framing, Mohrman employs queer feminist theory, queer of color critique, critical ethnic studies, and other methodological tools to reveal what Mormonism’s “peculiarity” (or lack thereof) tells about what it means to be American. The book’s rich examination of Mormonism’s place in the United States and also for what Mormonism’s being defined as “peculiar” reveals about the biopolitics of American exceptionalism. In short, Mohrman argues that Mormonism is not exceptional, and in fact, shows what it means to be American across time in U.S. history.
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By GuestAugust 8, 2022
This review comes from Makoto Hunter, a graduate student in history at the University of California–Santa Barbara studying American religious life at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and public memory. A former research and editorial assistant for the Intermountain Histories digital history project, she has authored two online public history series, titled “Mapping the Polygamy Underground” and “Confederate Markers in the Intermountain West.”
Reading Caroline Kline’s Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, has been an exercise of discovery, delight, and richly provoking insights. Based primarily on 98 anonymized oral history life interviews conducted with Latter-day Saint women of color (archived at the Claremont Colleges Library), Kline’s interdisciplinary work is part ethnography, part lived religion, and part theology. The book documents the lives of Latter-day Saint women of color, examines their experiences with and perspectives on intersections of religion, gender, race, and class, and argues for understanding their agentive lives through the lens of a shared moral orientation which Kline calls non-oppressive connectedness. Attentive to interviewees’ expressed priorities and values, Kline both shares their stories in their irreducible complexity and highlights key throughlines and contextually specific nuances in what ultimately synthesizes into a lay theology expressed from the margins of the tradition. As such, in addition to gathering personal, textured accounts of what it is like to live as a woman of color in Mormonism, Crossroads also expresses a Mormonism that is interpreted, adapted, and authored by women of color. This book is an indispensable companion for any study of contemporary Mormonism, particularly as expressed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Crossroads’ denominational focus).
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