Guest Post: Erin Anderson, “In and Out”

Today, as part of our continuing series on Mormonism’s Many Images, we are pleased to welcome Erin Anderson as a guest blogger. Erin left the LDS Church in her early teens, along with her parents and siblings; her extended family is still active. She holds degrees in religious studies from New York University and Boston University, and works as an administrator at Harvard.

The last time I set foot in an LDS building, more than a decade ago, I spent the entire day in the foyer. It was an ideal location. Like the rest of my immediate family, I had come to welcome these in-between settings: close enough to see friends and relatives, but removed from problematic religious spaces. My uncle?s wedding at the temple? We?ll volunteer to watch the kids outside. Visiting grandparents? Let?s fly in on Sunday afternoon, to spare them from asking us to church. We kept the peace by finding comfortable gray areas, neither embracing nor rejecting our heritage.

My parents, sisters, and I had withdrawn from a tight-knit congregation two years earlier, resulting in this ?betwixt and between? strategy. Even in Massachusetts? progressive Mormon community?surrounded by the lovely women of Exponent II?it had simply become too difficult for my mom and dad to raise three liberal, feminist daughters. And so I twiddled my thumbs that Sunday outside the chapel doors, already a veteran of living between two cultures at fourteen.

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Where Do I Come From? What Am I? Where Am I Going?: Exploring Representations of Mormonism to Understand American Religious History

In my years in Boston, I have been a frequent visitor at the city?s wonderful Museum of Fine Arts. While I couldn?t name a single favorite object, one piece that I return to again and again is Paul Gauguin?s epic masterpiece, ?Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?? While there is much to be said about the painting, I?m most concerned in this post with its title. Students and scholars tend to be a self-critical bunch, and I think most of us regularly ask these questions of ourselves and try to have ready answers for our colleagues. But when you?re a non-Mormon in the world of Mormon Studies, I?ve found that those questions take on a special shape and urgency. Who am I? What?s my real interest in Mormonism? What exactly am I going to do with my scholarly explorations of Mormonism in American culture? What?s a non-Mormon doing studying the Latter-day Saints? Am I anti-? Is it a fetish? Am I on the road to conversion? All of these questions are regularly leveled at me by Mormons and non-Mormons alike, and regularly with a degree of suspicion bordering on accusation.

So, where do I come from? I was raised in rural America, in a family that I only realized as I got older was noteworthy for our relative religious diversity ? and our general acceptance of it. We counted members of a variety of Christian denominations in the extended clan, including a number of very heterodox members of different denominations (a Methodist grandmother who argued with people in church that the Trinity wasn?t biblical, anyone?), as well as nonbelievers of several different stripes. There was disagreement, but in general we accepted that we were all doing our best and, really, none of us could be sure we had the corner on the meaning of life. It wasn?t until I was in my teens that I realized that many of the people around me ? most of whom were generally decent people ? were not as comfortable with religious difference as much of my family seemed to be. (As I got older, I also began to see that my family members were much more tolerant of Christian diversity than they were of non-Christian religions.) Unfortunately, I witnessed some respected adults in my life making very ugly comments ? which they often used their professed Christianity to justify ? about other people and their religions. In my teenaged brain, this gave rise to two questions: Isn?t Christianity supposed to be about loving your neighbor? Isn?t the United States supposed to be about separation of church and state and thus acceptance of religious diversity?

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“A Pink Life Raft in a Blue Ocean”: Feminist Studies of Mormonism– An Interview with Maxine Hanks, Part I

This is Part One of my interview with Maxine Hanks, who edited and published her well-known feminist anthology, Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, with Signature Books in 1992 here.

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Black History Month at the JI: An Abortive Campaign Against the Folklore (Mauss)

By Armand Mauss

Note: The following is an excerpt from Prof. Mauss’ recent memoir, Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport: Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic (UofU Press, 2012), which Prof. Mauss kindly shared with the Juvenile Instructor for inclusion in our Black History Month series. The memoir (which everyone should buy and read!) has received some attention in the ‘nacle here and here.

All during this post-1978 period, I remained in periodic personal contact with many black LDS friends, especially those in the Genesis Group.27 As conversations with my black LDS friends made clear, the circulation of this repackaged folklore greatly hindered the conversion and retention of new black members. I became well acquainted personally with one case, in particular, which produced a major national news story in 1998. This was the case of a middle-aged black couple named Jackson, who lived in Orange County, California. Betty Jackson happened to be a coworker with one of my sons at the Mazda Corporation, and through friendly conversation, each discovered that the other was a member of the LDS Church. The Jacksons had only very recently been converted along with one or two of their children. Having learned of the traditional LDS racial teachings and policies only after joining the Church, the Jacksons were having considerable trouble in accommodating the new information. My son gave Betty a copy of the Bush & Mauss Neither White nor Black in hopes that it might help them understand and deal with the matter, which it did to some extent.

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Joan in Armor, Zone Leaders in Skirts, and Mormon Women in Pants

“Mark what I say:  the woman who quarrels with her clothes, and puts on the dress of a man, is like the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist: they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all.”  — The Inquisitor, St. Joan (Penguin Books, 1982).  

George Bernard Shaw?s interpretation of the life of Joan of Arc reminds us of an element of Joan?s influence– her straining of a woman’s role by dressing like a man–  that caused such discomfort for her contemporaries and partly led to her excommunication and execution in 1431. The zealous reactions to Joan’s gendered nonconformity in the 1400s allow us to think about similar ways that modern faith communities are also stretched by challenges to their gender expectations.

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2012 in Retrospect: An Overview of Noteworthy Articles and Books in Mormon History

Continuing a tradition from the past three years, here is my overview of what I found to be the most noteworthy books and articles from the last twelve months. I like this format because it not only allows discussion of different media of publication, but it also encourages us to contemplate broader themes that are currently ?hot? in Mormon historiography. (Also make sure to check out Stapley’s always-helpful Christmas book list.)

As with previous years, I am posting this in early December and will thus miss those books published later this month. Further, the selection process was purely subjective and represent my own interests; please add your own suggestions in the comments.

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O Canada!

In keeping with a family tradition that we began last year in St. George, Utah, we turned MHA (the Mormon History Association annual meeting), which was held in Calgary this year, into an excuse for a very big (9,000+-mile) family road trip this year. In preparation for our border-crossing, I read a short story by author and English professor Thomas King titled “Borders” (if you haven’t read it, check it out). It is a story about a Blackfoot woman and her son (told from the perspective of the adolescent son) who get stranded at the U.S.-Canadian border–in Blackfoot Territory–when the mother insists that her nationality is Blackfoot and refuses to specify whether she is from the Canadian or American side: she is from the Blackfoot side. The two are on their way to Salt Lake City to visit the woman’s daughter who had previously moved there, convinced by a friend that it is the greatest place on earth, which the daughter reiterates in her postcards and travel brochures sent home (though, upon their arrival, she admits that she is thinking of returning home). Though never directly or explicitly so, the story is an excellent study in the complex mingling of Canadian-American-Blackfoot-Mormon identities that combine and comingle for several individuals in the area often referred to, among others things, as southern Alberta.

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The Sacred Parking Garage Effect

I get dibs on this clunky coining, but I wanted to articulate something that I’ve noticed in the way many non-academy-trained Mormons approach history. You probably have recognized the same phenomenon under a different name (and I’d love to know what you call it).

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Revisiting the Impossible Question – Part II

And…the objections :

Firstly, her claim that gender is nothing but a construct based on a discourse of power, and sex is but a mysterious part of our eternal identity, leaves nothing clearly meaningful in the concepts of maleness and femaleness. This approach seems to elide differences, as others from the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to Mary Wollstonecraft, have attempted to do. To me, it is clear that Mormon doctrine is fully committed to the concept of differentiation, and the idea that being male or female is an eternal part of our identity (or in other words, that sex and gender are inextricably linked, if not the same thing). Our doctrine of Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, the temple narrative that is so grounded in the crowning union of male and female and the creation-wide participation in procreation and regeneration*, the creation narrative steeped in organizing matter and creating order by separation, differentiation, opposition, and the underlying narrative of the plan of salvation that begins and ends with a family of male and female parents?not to mention the explicit Proclamation on the Family?confirm this binary. But if, as Flake and others say, gender is constructed, and sexual differentiation is evolutionary, what is the binary on which creation, exaltation, and eternal marriage are constructed, and which persists through the eternities as an element in our identity? With such a paradigm, are we left with anything at all?

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Revisiting the Impossible Question- Part I

Last post, I offered some musings about the supposedly ?impossible question? I posed to Kathleen Flake at the Methodist-Mormon conference back in February, regarding the definition of femininity and masculinity. At the time, neither the question nor the answer seemed to satisfy either of us, so Dr. Flake kindly offered to follow up with me later to continue the conversation. It was a thought-provoking conversation, and after giving it more thought, I?ve come back to the drawing board with more questions and ideas.

By way of quick summary, I had asked Kathleen Flake to define masculinity and femininity in a way that

a) did not reduce them to mere sexual characteristics or biological difference (which, on its own, seems void of real significance, and furthermore, seems difficult to untangle from temporal causes like evolutionary strategies, which don?t seem to be necessary in a pre or post mortal existence)

b) did not reduce them to character attributes (which seem to boil down to characteristics that should ultimately be universally shunned [coarseness, aggression, emotional neediness, etc.], or universally cultivated [compassion, gentleness, creativity, reason])

c) explains the necessary synthesis of a male and female counterpart for the state of exaltation (as prescribed by doctrines regarding the necessity of temple marriage sealings as we now understand them: monogamous, male-female spousal units)

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