My objective in this article is to complicate the broader historical context in which Carol Lynn Pearson’s lifelong advocacy and feminist work exists within. I hope to do so with care and gentleness at this time when our community is mourning.

Mormons are unique in our gift for building and disseminating mythmaking narratives. It is something I quite admire about us. In fact, I think it is something that Pearson also admired about us. Sometimes, though, that mythmaking comes at the expense of communities othered by Mormonism. Mormons like stories. We like our myths. We like a clean, straightforward narrative, without any complications. It’s what brings the Spirit to us. We like the goosebumps and the knots in our throats as we recount our myths. And sometimes that is appropriate. But oftentimes it causes harm. Sometimes the mythmaking itself is an act of violence against othered communities. What I will say is that there is a significant epidemic of violence happening right now in our communities that is going unheard and unnamed, unresearched and unseen. And Mormon feminist myths and mythmaking act as a cover for it. But we’ll get to that.

The first time I saw the votive candles made in the images of the prominent Mormon feminists of Exponent II, including Pearson, I understood that othering on a personal level. I felt that harm. Make no mistake, Mormon women are indeed very creative and even funny in their mythmaking abilities. Votive candles of feminists are both deeply unserious and funny, while also holding onto something true. The truth they are meant to convey is that these women are untouchable. They are future Heavenly Mothers.

As a gender studies and feminist scholar, I recognize that this places Mormon feminism on an entirely different plane than other feminisms. I don’t know of any other feminists who are untouchable. Feminism is itself a critique, and to make it better, the job of feminists is to offer new critiques of the feminist theories presented. What I’ve found is that this foundational point to feminism is puzzlingly unacceptable in Mormon feminism.

I think of myself as a bit of a Butlerian. This means that as a gender scholar, I often adhere to the feminist critiques of Judith Butler. While I critique them at important junctions (as someone who thinks of themselves as a Marxist feminist first, my feminist inclinations are sometimes in conflict with one another), I do find myself often in a Butlerian camp. And still, I cannot for the life of me think of dedicating a votive candle to Judith Butler in a little shrine to my Butlerian feminism. As a scholar, that sounds preposterous.

But not in Mormonism.

So what I’d like to do is take Mormon feminisms seriously. I want to take them as a genuine feminist analysis of the world. In doing so, they must be open to both adherence and critique. Pearson, then, is not just a divine mother to be put on her Mormon pedestal where Mormon patriarchy wants her to remain, like all good mothers. I want to do something a little more interesting than that and engage with her as the feminist scholar that she is. I think her life well lived is worth taking her work seriously. To me, a gender scholar and feminist, that means engaging with the work beyond platitudes, moving it into a more scholarly feminism, with its bristly edges and disciplined thoughtfulness, and, yes, even critique. I seek to rip her off the votive candle and make her human again. Because that is what we are mourning. A superhuman, but human nonetheless. We are mourning her humanness, her humanity, her love lost. She’s allowed to be complicated rather than perfect. She’s allowed to exist in her much broader historical context that touches lives and events far beyond Mormonism and its myths.

Let me first say that there are plenty of Mormon feminists who are not queer friendly. There are many that are queerphobic. We oftentimes excuse their queerphobia because they say it so nicely or because of the veneration of the speaker. Throughout the foundation of Exponent II, many queerphobic statements were made, many of which were also dog whistles. The founders did not want to be associated with lesbians; and feminism in the 1970s was often conflated with lesbianism. If you go back to the founding documents of Exponent II and the articles written about the foundation in Dialogue and other places, there are plenty of lesbophobic statements made in order to distance their Mormon feminist movement from lesbianism. I take high issue with that, especially when those women are then placed on votive objects. I do not have to respect them or their Mormon feminism at the expense of my own self-acknowledgement and lesbianism. I choose not to respect much of their work, because it is centered in a cisheteronormative fantasy world that I do not live in. This lesbophobic and cisheteronormative worldview sits in contrast to Pearson’s feminism.

To review, Pearson married and had children with a gay man. She then divorced him so he could navigate a queer life. When he contracted HIV/AIDS, she welcomed him into her home and cared for him until he died. I put this in as blunt of terms as possible to demonstrate the brutality of the AIDS epidemic and the torture the United States government insisted on delivering to these men as a punishment for their homosexuality. I refuse to let our homophobic culture off the hook by diminishing the horror of what actually happened.

She went on to write about her experience in Goodbye, I Love You, an important recounting of her experience. The book changed lives, and changed perceptions in Mormonism and the broader United States’ context about the epidemic and gay men contracting AIDS. The work itself has its place as an important historical moment. She was asked to share her experience on talk shows around the country.

When we reflect on this historical moment, we largely consider her role as nurturer and caretaker. We think about her in cisheteronormative terms: She was a straight mother who did her job. She did care work for a man. This narrative blinds us to other ways of telling that story.

Pearson does not exist in a cisheteronormative world. She divorced. She had to earn her own living. She understood and feared poverty. She didn’t remarry or focus on a cishetero life and relationships. She loved a man in a nonnormative, nonromantic or sexual way. Like many of her contemporaries, she made a name for herself because of her attachment to a man, but in an entirely unique way that did not come to benefit from the proximity to him, but instead she stood to be condemned because of her proximity to him. All of which she did in an incredibly homophobic historical context both in Mormonism and across the United States. She lived, for all intents and purposes, a very queer life. There is a lot there to admire, and I choke up listing these things, because they are very meaningful. It wasn’t just her proximity to a gay man, it was her proximity to the lives and experiences of lesbian women. Women who, like her, feared poverty due to their lack of employment and discrimination in their workplaces. Women who chose love and nonnormative partnerships and themselves over financial and economic stability in a queerphobic world. Pearson understood those experiences much better than her contemporary Mormon feminist colleagues ever could or even wanted to as they sat perched in ivory towers, constantly seeking closer proximity to Mormon patriarchy and distance from lesbianism.

Calling Pearson straight is not quite fair. Calling her queer might not necessarily be entirely accurate. She sat in a space between. Perhaps the queerest space of all, actually. She was interpreted, understood, and translated to the Mormon and American communities as straight. She was broadcast as: a straight woman, put in a difficult position by her gay husband, who chose love. This is an uncomplicated narrative consumable for the public writ large. This is an important point I need you to remember for later.

Goodbye, I Love You was published in 1986. This year is its 40th anniversary. We can commemorate it by evaluating it from a gender studies and queer studies historical perspective. It is queer not simply because it centers love for a gay man; it is queer because the woman who chose that path did so in noncisheteronormative way. She rejected cisheteronormativity for herself and her own life even after Gerald’s death. Her entire life was nonnormative.

She went on to be a staunch activist for LGBTQ+ people and causes up until her death this week.

Instead of vying for proximity to Mormon patriarchy, she utilized her privilege as a straight (passing?) woman to gain access to Mormon patriarchal spaces where she could fight for those more marginalized than herself. She fought for the very people other Mormon feminists were terrified of being seen with or as. She gained notoriety through her beautiful writing and storytelling, and turned that privilege into currency she could use on behalf of LGBTQ+ people in rooms with Mormon leaders. That is an ally. Someone willing to risk their reputation and spend their social currency on groups less privileged than themselves. Anything short of this, I argue, is short of allyship status. Pearson is the benchmark. We all can seek to be allies in this way. She showed us how.

So far, we have examined Pearson’s life from a perspective centered on her and the relationships spinning out from her. That is generally the way her life is examined and interpreted. As a historian, though, I can’t help but think of how to put her life and experiences into the historical context they existed in. She is not just an important Mormon feminist, her life is situated in a particular historical moment. She is a historical figure, too.

So let me tell you my experience and then let’s return back to the 1980s and zoom out a bit.

I don’t actually remember the first time I learned about the AIDS epidemic, but I do remember that it felt distant. Despite the fact that I was born in the midst of it, in 1986, and it was all around in media; I felt no connection to it. In part, because queer people most often grow up in non-queer families. We are not taught our queer heritage; instead we are taught queerphobia. I’m sure I felt a strange incongruence when I learned about it and men-loving-men (MLM) experiences. When I got into early adulthood, I learned that an uncle to my childhood best friends died of AIDS, not of cancer as we had originally been told. But even that felt distant. I had never met him. He was estranged from the family. That was the thing. My religious communities intentionally and cruelly drove out queer people, so I did not know them.

It wasn’t until I was in the second half of my thirties that the story of AIDS felt like it was my history, too. My heritage. My family. My community. I was at my first International Affirmation conference for LGBTQ+ Mormons. The last day of the conference always falls on a Sunday. We get up that morning to have a sort of testimony meeting where we testify of our queerness and our divinity. Before the testimony meeting, though, we hold a special mourning session where members of Affirmation stand up, one by one, and announce the name of a member of our community lost whom we want to remember. Over the years, this part of the ritual meeting should be getting longer as more time has passed and more people pass in that time, yet fewer and fewer people there are able to name people. This ceremony began during the AIDS epidemic when these community members, people I love and admire, were attending monthly, even weekly, funerals. This ceremony just a few decades ago would take considerable time, as all the names were remembered of all the men lost. When I first attended, I had met many of the older men and become friends with them. So as the time came for this ceremony, I didn’t know what would take place, but it hit me especially hard. My friends were not abstract. They were people I sat with, laughed with, bonded with. They were now my family. And they were the ones standing to state name after name after name of the people who had died, stating specifically when they mentioned someone who had died of AIDS. When you witness that, when you sit in a history that was not yours and suddenly you realize it is yours, it breaks you. This thing that was distant, is now personal. The brothers, uncles, and chosen family I have lost, we have lost. It is unbearable as you sit through it. It is as though a piece of you is taken as each person stands to announce another name. You realize the room could and should be filled with all those names.

It makes sense to me, then, how and why Pearson is held in such esteem to many of these gay men. She took their story and made all of us feel something when the lives of gay men alone could not do it. She used her privilege and told Gerald’s story. That is a gift. And when you witness this moment at an Affirmation conference, you truly understand what a gift that was. You might also be angry. And you’d be right to be. Those men should be in that room with us.

It is hard to understate the impact of Goodbye, I Love You. It was published in 1986. Pearson went on Oprah that same year. It wasn’t until the next year, 1987 that the organization ACT UP, one of the most important AIDS activist organizations in the United States and the world, was organized. It also wasn’t until 1987 that Princess Diana first touched a man diagnosed with AIDS and broke the international stigma that it could be contracted through touch. It is historically significant that Pearson was advertising this book before both of those historical moments.

But in Utah, Pearson was not the only one offering care to a man dying from AIDS. 90% of the men diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s were treated by one doctor. One doctor at the only hospital in Utah that would admit them, Holy Cross. Her case load was so significant, they had to build a clinic for her and she brought on help. She fell in love with the first nurse she brought in. Dr. Kristin Reis and her partner Maggie Snyder continued to take on the care work of nearly all the HIV/AIDS cases in the state of Utah for a decade.

The oral history collection at the University of Utah of Women in STEM offers a better retelling of this story than I can:

“Kristen Ries’s treatment strategies stand out for their unwavering emphasis of love for her patients, characterized most notably by her thoughtful policies and sacrifices of time and money. Financial support for the practice was slim to none, especially in the first few years of the epidemic. It was too political to receive much government funding, and patients’ insurance coverage was complicated and often unaccommodating – some insurance companies deliberately avoided working with Ries’ practice after learning it was for HIV/AIDS patients. Dealing with the lack of financial resources along with the process of bringing in medications and other resources required hours of paperwork. Ries, with a feeling that it’s just what she had to do, stayed after hours most nights to complete it. Furthermore, a lot of the money that they did receive went into a bank account she started for the patients and was used to purchase medications, pay co-pays, and generally support patients without money. When Snyder joined the team, they spent time making home visits to patients on the weekends and visiting schools and other groups to educate about HIV.

“Additionally, their practice was built around making physical contact with their patients. During the height of the epidemic and as the stigma around it intensified, there was a universal fear of touching people with HIV. Especially before knowledge of how the disease was transmitted was well-known, HIV patients were seen as disgusting. Ries quickly realized the impact this stigma had on her patients and wanted to make sure they didn’t believe it. Under Ries’ instruction, everyone working with the HIV/AIDS patients prioritized skin-to-skin contact by way of holding hands, touching shoulders, and ending every visit with a hug. These policies in tandem with their authentic, accepting conversation rhetoric proved that their patients’ best interest was truly the heart of their efforts even if their resources were exhausted.”

(Their work and efforts were remembered in a 2021 documentary, Quiet Heroes. An interesting title. Were they quiet? Or has the history been silenced?)

This is what happened across the country. Lesbians stepped up. Despite the fact that lesbians faced unrepentant and well-documented misogyny from gay men in queer spaces, it was the lesbians across the country that stepped in and were the first to literally touch these men.

In 1983, as the epidemic was gaining more attention, the US government banned “men who have sex with men” from donating blood. This homophobic policy, by the way, was not rescinded until 2023. The result was a national blood shortage at the same time that those with HIV/AIDS needed frequent blood transfusions. The ban only applied to men having sex with men and not women, and lesbians took note. They began lesbian blood drives, a grassroots movement later organized into the Blood Sisters. From there, lesbian organizers built entire networks of care. They became bedside advocates in hospitals and clinics. They provided companionship and counseling. They held vigils.

Eventually, gay men formed their own group to support the lesbian organizations.

As a direct result of the lesbian-led activism and care work, gay men chose to officially push for the change of the acronym GLBT to LGBT to honor the advocacy of these women, and also as an acknowledgement of and beginning of reconciliation for the misogyny in the community towards lesbians.

Ries, Snyder, and Pearson are all then part of the larger historical moment of women caretakers of men with HIV/AIDS.

Pearson, though, stands out, as the non-lesbian.

Placing Pearson in her historical context, then, offers us new insights into new topics. As she was openly embracing queer people, her Mormon feminist contemporaries were distancing themselves from queer people. Her story, then, offers us a more complicated view of Mormon feminism and Mormon feminisms. Placing her in the historical context also places her in a milieu of women doing care work for men with HIV/AIDS, most of whom are not remembered or acknowledged in the broader cultural remembrances because they were queer women, because they were lesbians. Remember the point I said earlier, Pearson was brought into spaces she otherwise would not be in precisely because she was translated to the public as the “straight” spouse.

One instance of lesbian erasure isn’t suspicious or even maybe a red flag, but as they add up, it shows a deliberate and sinister pattern. This isn’t just one instance where the lesbian narrative gets buried, it is part of a pattern of lesbophobia and erasure.

There are quite a few Mormon feminisms and feminist strains flowing through the larger second-wave feminist movement. Perhaps the most recognizable one to those outside Mormonism is that of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) pushed forward by Mormon housewife, Sonia Johnson.

As many of those second-wave Mormon feminists were insisting on their distance from lesbianism, they were also distancing themselves from the ERA. They knew that maintain their proximity to Mormon power, they would have to do so. Like with her stance on queer issues, Pearson rejected this call from other contemporary feminists. She was an open supporter of the ERA. Her recent diaries showcase her attempts to bring ERA support to church leadership and their open rejection of her written work in support of the ERA. Pearson, again, took the more difficult path of fighting for feminist rights, standing toe-to-toe with Mormon leadership on the issue.

Sonia Johnson conducted a series of awe-inspiring protests against Mormon leadership who opposed the ERA. At one point, she and other protesters chained themselves to the gate of the Seattle, Washington Latter-day Saint temple. She testified in Congress on behalf of the ERA. And by 1984, overlapping with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Johnson was running for President of the United States as the candidate for the Citizens Party.

And then we lost her.

She didn’t die. She suffered a different kind of death.

Now, the story of the Mormon connection to the ERA is another mythmaking one. One where all Mormon housewives and stay-at-home moms (SAHM) can catch glimpses of themselves. It is often the first story a Mormon feminist falls in love with on their transition away from Mormon patriarchy. Unfortunately, many Mormon women on that journey just… stop reading. They love and admire Johnson’s memoir on this topic, From Housewife to Heretic, but then discard the rest of her story, her utility running out for them.

They participate in this death of Johnson.

After her defeat in the 1984 election, Johnson fled to the American Southwest where she started a lesbian commune with her life partner.

When I say we lost her, I mean that is literally what the Salt Lake Tribune reported when they went looking to find her in 2019. The Tribune article reads: “This week in Mormon Land: Finding ERA champion Sonia Johnson, the Romney effect on scholars, a missionary’s great escape.” Here is an excerpt:

“Finding Sonia

“Whatever happened to Sonia Johnson, the firebrand feminist of the 1970s and ’80s whose criticism of Latter-day Saint leaders and crusade for the Equal Rights Amendment led to her excommunication and her own presidential pursuit?

“Logan Herald Journal Managing Editor Charles McCollum answers that question, partly, in a recent column.

“Because McCollum had written in 2010 about his failed quest to find Johnson, who had attended Utah State University, producers of the public television series “We’ll Meet Again” contacted the journalist and, ultimately, shared with him a sneak peek of the episode documenting the tearful reunion between Johnson, now 82, and her former ‘comrade in arms,’ Zoe Nicholson.

“‘You know, we were going to make a new world,’ Johnson tells Nicholson. ‘Nothing was happening, so you know what, I thought maybe I’ll just be somebody else. So I changed my name and just got over my broken heart — well, lived with my broken heart.’”

In 35 years we never followed up? On a woman who was instrumental in leading women through their feminist journeys out of Mormonism? On one of the most important feminist figures in Mormonism?

You mean to tell me, the women making literal votive objects to Mormon feminists weren’t at least a little interested in why and how we LOST SONIA JOHNSON?

It appears from the reporting that Johnson wanted to be lost. She wanted to start a new life. She wanted to start a lesbian life. But she didn’t completely start over. You know who she continued to communicate with through those years? The leading figure in Mormon lesbian history of the second half of the 20th century, Ina Mae Murri. Now, you likely don’t know who that is. Because… lesbian. But Murri was a leader in Affirmation. She routinely wrote letters to Exponent II and Dialogue, many of which are preserved in the Affirmation Collection in the Special Collections at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. Many of these letters mention that these publications refuse to address homosexuality and lesbianism in particular. In the few responses she receives back, there are excuses for that erasure, but the publications don’t remedy it.

Among the correspondence with these organizations are letters written to Murri from Johnson. There is letter in which Johnson tells Murri that she was the person to introduce her to female homosexuality.

Johnson wasn’t found by the Salt Lake Tribune first. She was, of course, found by a Mormon gender and queer studies professor, Chris Talbot. There are reasons that some of us seek out Johnson that go beyond the “housewife” narrative, and venture into the lesbian narrative. Talbot wrote the recent biography on Johnson published in 2024 titled Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist in which she recounts much of this missing history.

Pearson was not afraid to evoke Johnson in her writings. She wrote thoughtfully and purposefully about Johnson with a sense of admiration. I admire that about Pearson. Again, she wasn’t afraid of using her proximity to Mormon leadership to promote and sustain those much further from those authoritarian doors.

Despite Pearson’s efforts, lesbians remain buried in Mormon history and in Mormon feminist history.

Unfortunately, as Pearson became the face of Mormonism’s response to HIV/AIDS patients, it worked to erase the important queer history of lesbian caretakers and advocacy. This is not to the fault of Pearson. Insisting she do all the jobs is not a fair ask. But part of my heart crumbles under the weight of yet more histories that get told before the Mormon lesbian histories are. That resentment doesn’t fall to Pearson; it falls on a community that has failed me and my women-loving-women (WLW) and genderqueer peers. It just happens to be personified by Pearson.

At an Affirmation conference, as one of the very few lesbian leaders within the presidency in the organization’s history, I walked up to meet Pearson who had presented at that conference. She was flanked on each side by gay men who literally had linked arms with her. I was told to step back by the gay men. I felt this to be a perfect metaphor for the lesbian experience. No matter what positions and achievements we collect, we are told to step back, out of the light that shines on straight (passing?) women and the gay men. That would be the only opportunity I would have to meet that great woman, it turns out, and I didn’t get my chance.

While gay men who remember and are tormented by the trauma of HIV/AIDS cling to the memory of Pearson in these days of mourning, there is another silent epidemic of violence happening in our Mormon communities.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic social distancing began, Mormon women have been coming out in droves. The pandemic restrictions unlocked something deep inside Mormon women: their yearning for the love of other women. While this phenomenon has a long history in Mormonism, the last six years have accelerated it. Women who did not explore or understand their own sexuality, in part because they had been told from a very young age that they are asexual beings at church, before they were quickly married off to men, many while they were still teenagers, now are discovering that sexuality.

The long history of Mormon feminists distancing themselves from lesbian narratives and lesbian lives has done these women a disservice. No. It is more than that. It has done us harm. They have read Housewife to Heretic, but don’t know about Johnson’s political lesbianism. They read Exponent II, but will not find the consistent and unwavering words of Murri where she asked repeatedly for lesbian voices to be published.

They are alone in houses where their husbands forbid their queerness with no one to read or turn to, no lesbian legacy, despite the fact that it is all right there, just beneath the surface, just beneath the Pearson story. It’s there.

I often find myself sitting with a story Nathan Kitchen, former Affirmation president, told me as I was making my way into leadership. In the 2010s, he was the leader of the Affirmation group for gay dads. His leadership partner was Rene Singleton, a lesbian mom, leading the lesbian mom group. He told me that after one international conference he was hyped. He approached Rene to reflect on the positivity the conference offered to him and his group of dads. Rene responded that she would collect as many of the materials from the conference as possible to deliver to the mothers of Affirmation who were not able to attend the conference. While Nathan enjoyed a conference with other dads who could support one another, many of the mothers did not feel safe enough to attend the conference.

I knew what Nathan meant before he even expanded on this story. While many men like Gerald Pearson have the support of their wives or ex-wives to attend an Affirmation conference and come out as gay, women in mixed orientation marriages understand that their sexuality is a threat to their husbands’ status. These men refuse to let their wives attend support groups outside of their houses with threats against them for doing so. Rene would bring them what support she could in the form of conference materials.

In the early 1980s, Pearson did what many would not or could not do. She cared for her dying gay ex-husband when every message in the world told her not to. She did it anyway.

It is no longer 1986. It has been forty years. Still there is no male version of Pearson. There is no man who has publicly and continuously supported, aided, and used his power and privilege to care and nurse his gay ex-wife. There is no man standing up at Affirmation conferences telling the story of how he met with his local leadership about all the women in his ward who came out as queer to their husbands and then been beaten for it and how he took on the mission of helping those women escape those marriages. There’s no man leading a gay women's underground railroad.

Since coming out and stepping into Affirmation leadership I’ve been inundated with story after story of women coming out to their husbands and being met with emotional, psychological, and physical violence.

This is one of the new epidemics against queer people. The other is the violence and social isolation of transgender people, especially transgender women, from our society, leading many research institutions to classify the situation as a genocide against transgender Americans.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in Utah is strikingly understudied. Utah State University has highlighted the lack of research and awareness about IPV in Utah, and called for more funding for research into it.

We know from research at the national level that queer women experience much higher rates of IPV from male perpetrators than heterosexual women. We know the statistics for bisexual women is as high as 61%, but we really do not have good statistical reporting on the sexual orientation of victims and survivors of IPV nor how often the violence is enacted specifically because of a partner’s sexual orientation.

What I have is years of anecdotal evidence that this issue is much bigger in our Mormon communities than we even know. Rene’s account offers some confirmation of my suspicions.

In 2023, I first entered the Affirmation archives at the University of Utah. The first box I opened was of the newsletter Affinity for Women, a newsletter sent out to Mormon lesbians and WLW people across the world. Immediately I was struck by the amount of women seeking emotional and legal support as their husbands held custody of their children or threatened custody of their children because of the wives’ sexual orientation. There were immediate stories of violence against women by their Mormon husbands, especially as they sought divorce to seek a queer life.

What a stark difference these stories are to that of the one we know so well from Pearson.

On the one hand, you have a woman willing to care for her dying gay husband. On the other, you have husbands abusing, threatening, and manipulating their queer wives. One dies due to a systemic rejection of healthcare to gay men; how many women have we lost who we didn’t even know were queer because their husbands ended their stories before anyone could find out? I’m afraid of that number, but it will always and forever remain unknown.

How many women remain in the closet right now under threat? I wish I knew. Maybe if we were more forthright in our discussions of queer and lesbian women, the stories that we have right here, right beneath the surface, more women would feel supported to step out that door.

What if our Mormon feminisms dropped their immaterial obsessions with Heavenly Mothers to reach out a hand with material support for their lesbian sisters?

This was not the lone obligation of Pearson. She already did much more than enough. But she also showed us how. She paved this path. It is unfortunate and infuriating that even with her veneration, perhaps because of it, we still cannot follow in her footsteps. I hope we will start to try.

“A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.

“Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag.”

Save for the British confinements, I’ve examined the sites of all of these, and I can safely tell you: a concentration camp is coming to Utah. Again. Because if you can do it once here, you can do it again (see Topaz). The explicit goal, on the very first page, of the Topaz Museum, is to prevent what happened then from happening again (“our guiding principles are … to educate people to help prevent what happened during World War II at Topaz from ever happening again.”). Yet, here we are.

When I was 21, I studied abroad in Greece. For our spring break that year in 2007 my friends had planned a multi-country backpacking trip. They wanted to begin in Berlin. I was mostly uninterested in going to Germany. I had never been to Europe before, and thought perhaps this would be my last time in Europe. There were so many other places I wanted to go. But the German heritage that lives inside my body somewhere called to me the second we landed in Berlin. It is a hip place and as a mini-historian even then, I found it fascinating. We planned trips around the city with tour guides on our cheap budget, and ultimately found a great guide who took us on multiple tours, including on a train just outside the city.

When we arrived at the train station we had to walk to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp past hundred-year-old neighborhoods. I mention how old they were, because they were standing with Germans living in them when pillars of smoke from the first furnaces in any Nazi extermination camp touched the skies. You would be able to see that smoke from these houses. You would not be able to help but smell it. I tell you this in such detail, because as the guide was telling us to look to the sky where you would have seen that smoke, we were all horrified. “How could they do live here? How could you just stand by?” All of us had the same thought, which is why the guide was a very good one and deserved more money than we paid him. This was the first and only Nazi extermination camp I have ever been to. Many Americans visit these places as tourists, seeking some sort of connection to these places, yet never having to feel the national and devastating shame of having committed the atrocities ourselves. We are the “freers.” Contrast that with when I went to visit Topaz several years ago, no one else was there.

Because I couldn’t afford the whole trip with my friends and an unexpected train trip needed to be canceled, I ended up back in Berlin that same spring break by myself. I went back to Sachsenhausen with the guide. It wasn’t the camp that drew me in, it was the location and neighborhood. At the time, despite being an out queer even if forced back in the closet, I did not identify with the people inside those walls forced to wear a pink triangle, indicating they were homosexual. I identified strangely with those outside the walls. The Sachsenhausen camp, I would learn from the guide, was built in 1936. That was the same year that Berlin hosted the Olympic Games. On these back-to-back trips to Berlin, I would visit the Olympic Stadium, only a few short train station hops from this dark place. In the same city where Hitler was hosting the entire world, down the street was a Nazi concentration camp, later an extermination camp. I saw the furnaces. Then I saw the track and field. You could easily visit both in the same day. It was then that I felt my German blood boil. I wanted it out of me. I attempted to package it nicely by saying, “This is why my family left Germany after World War I.” But this is my blood. The attempts to distance myself, my family, my heritage from this moment of history was not what was needed, actually. What I needed was to claim the parts of me, my family, my people, my blood that did this, and sit in the horror of it. “They” didn’t do this; “we” did. Until we can claim that, this will keep happening.

I had a similar experience visiting Topaz. My family had friends who lived in Delta, Utah in the 1940s. My family visited Delta. If you visit Delta today, you will see it is not big enough to not notice a concentration camp in its midst. I felt the feelings I felt in Berlin, but with age and maturity, they hit a little differently. I had practice sitting with the horror that my people lived next to the barbarism of a concentration camp. It physically hurt. At this point, I was a PhD candidate, waiting for the borders to open again after the pandemic to take my research years in Romania to write about Romanian fascism, the extermination of Romanian Jewry, and the remnants of the Romanian gulags I would pass on the train from Bucharest to Constanta. But for the moment, I was staring from the car at a demolished site of my neighborhood concentration camp.

When it is happening, the rhetoric of dehumanization runs so deep, you hear it so often, that the term “concentration camp” feels distant; it feels inflammatory; it feels inaccurate. No one, when it is happening, thinks they are living next to a fortress of devastation. In fact, the Sachsenhausen extermination camp did not begin in 1936 as an extermination camp, but once you live next to something so barbaric for so long, you eventually just become barbaric yourself, and the powers that be think they can do whatever they want to the “prisoners” who live next to you.

When I stood in the Sachsenhausen neighborhood, I wondered, as we all do, “What would I have done?” When I sat in the car outside Topaz, I wondered the same thing. And here I am, three days out from news that Utah will house a 10,000-person facility, and those wonderings are no longer wonderings. I am more horrified now than I was at either of those moments, because my time has come. I will find out. And what courage is to be found in my blood? None so far. My people let it happen once, then again, and now here I sit.

We will build a concentration camp, and in less than a decade, the world will gather once again for the Olympics. In fifty years, will tourists board a bus to go from the concentration camp site, to the Olympic stadium on the same day?

I was not the “good German.” I was not the “good Deltan.” Will I be the “good Utahn” now? No. This travesty is on my hands as it is on all of ours. We will never wash the blood away; it will run through our children and our children’s children. It has already begun. We cannot undo the years of inhumanity we have lived next door to already. We can never atone, collectively. We are responsible. And generations after us will forever judge us for our lack of courage, strength; they will judge us for our fear. Hopefully they will sit and take to heart the role their blood has played. “They” are not doing this right now; “we” are.

This is a very queer sentence with some lesbianese (lesbian vernacular) that you might not be familiar with unless you are in woman-loving-women (wlw) spaces. “Comphet” is shorthand for “compulsory heterosexuality.”

Compulsory heterosexuality “is the theory that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by a patriarchal and heteronormative society. The term was popularized by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay titled ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’,” (Wikipedia, “compulsory heterosexuality”).

This is a concept obviously embedded in Mormon culture, but it is also — frighteningly — embedded in Mormon feminism.

Who is Mormon feminism for? And what is it challenging? Those are important questions which many Mormon feminists have answered for many of us. For the most part, Mormon feminism is a space where comphet is still celebrated, and those challenging it aren’t always welcome in the Mormon feminist space in any substantial way, and that is because of a second-wave Mormon feminism that has never grappled with these questions.

I happen to think it is well-past time to deal with comphet in Mormon feminism.

Admittedly, I was naïve, even as a graduate student, because didn’t fully understand that I didn’t feel comfortable taking up space in Mormon feminism, because, largely, Mormon feminism has outright rejected lesbians, lesbianism, and a lesbian politic.

I didn’t think that Mormon feminism was a place I was included, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I wasn’t until I realized that it is because I, and those like me, were purposefully not included. And we will not be accepted in Mormon feminism until we make our own space in Mormon feminism and help other Mormon feminists acknowledge the history they continue to build upon has a firm foundation on heteronormativity at best and lesbophobia at worst.

That wasn’t always the case. Before 1950, lesbians and lesbianism were celebrated in Mormonism at large and within Mormon Feminism. In fact, there was a September 1912 article in the Young Women’s Journal titled “Sappho of Lesbos” in which the article celebrated the love of women for other women (D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example, 1996, pp. 172-3). That same year, two lesbian Mormon actresses met, Ada Dwyer Russell and Amy Lowell, after Russell had a baby and separated from her husband. The two women lived together for the rest of Lowell’s life, writing poetry about their lesbianism including Lowell’s line that “no verses can equal the poetry of a young girl’s naked body,” (Quinn, 172). In fact, the great aunt of Thomas S. Monson, Caroline Monson, was a member of a Salt Lake City lesbian household called Casa Lesbiana (Quinn, 171-2).

The Lesbian Menace

But with second-wave feminism in the 1960s came a second-wave Mormon feminism with a purposeful lesbophobia which rejected the rise of the lesbian politic within the movement.

The broader Second-wave feminist movement brought with it a schism between feminists at the time: the radical feminists who believed in a lesbian politic, and the feminists who outright rejected the lesbian politic. Lesbianism had developed past a sexual or romantic orientation by 1960. To many second-wave feminists, it was a “dangerous” politic. And nowhere did that tension between the radical feminists and the conservative feminists play out more than within the Mormon movement, and it has left us with a tarnished history of only one side.

The Women’s Liberation Movement, or Women’s Lib, excluded lesbians from their movement, calling them the “Lavender Menace.”

In 1966, Betty Freidan and Pauli Murray wrote the Statement of Purpose for the National Organization for Women (NOW). Freidan, a cishet woman, and Murray, a lesbian, began to see the purpose of the organization differently. Lesbians within the movement began to voice their concerns as more mainstream feminists rejected them within the new Women’s Lib. Freidan “vehemently opposed the inclusion of lesbians and their concerns within the feminist movement” and “was deeply angered by this action,” (Maeve Korengold, “The Complexity of Lesbian Identity Following Second-Wave Feminism,” March 19, 2022).

As those who opposed the Women’s Lib movement, like Phyllis Schlafly, pointed to NOW and other organizations as “militant, man-hating lesbians,” Freidan and the leaders of those organizations distanced themselves more and more from lesbians, lesbian causes, and the lesbian politic (“militant” and “man-hating” became dog whistles for “lesbian” after this), (Korengold).

Lesbians formed their own organizations, including a new organization they called the Lavender Menace, using Freidan’s own words. This resulted in a radical feminist movement which sought to fight against both the misogyny in gay rights groups and the homophobia in the women’s rights groups.

The radical feminist schism gained so much attention from their countermovement that a year after Freidan’s purge of the lesbians, NOW issued a statement that “NOW recognizes the double oppression of women who are lesbians… NOW acknowledges the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism,” (Korengold). And by 1973, NOW established a NOW Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism.

In the midst of this struggle between radical lesbian feminism and mainstream feminism, a new lesbian politic was advanced. No longer was lesbianism just a sexual or romantic orientation; it was a politic, a political movement to live by where women surrounded themselves with and lived with other women and removed themselves from any romantic or sexual relationships with men. Whether through sexual relationships with women, romantic ones, or simply platonic ones, the woman cared for one another without any marital contracts to men, or to one another. It was queer and intentional, and many feminists who adopted the lesbian politic formed their own lesbian communes (Wikipedia, “Political Lesbianism”).

This was the atmosphere in which second-wave Mormon feminism developed. Just like the broader movement, second-wave Mormon feminism had a similar schism that we have never addressed in Mormon feminism since.

The Mormon Lesbian Menace

As the larger second-wave battle raged on between the radical lesbians and the mainstream feminists, a Mormon woman was sitting in church in Virginia in 1977 waiting to hear the reasons for which her church was flatly rejecting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed by feminist leaders in the United States. When the stake president stood up to explain why the church was so adamantly against the ERA, he said he had stopped on the way to buy a magazine with an article about the ERA and after reading it before his talk, he could now discuss why the church took their position against the ERA. The woman in the audience, sitting with her husband, was appalled by the talk. This was Virginia, she thought. This wasn’t Utah. This was a place where people discussed and thought about US politics. It wasn’t a place likely to base an opinion for all congregants on one magazine article without sufficient research. She then realized that her Church was taking a dogmatic and patriarchal stance on the matter, because it threatened the authority of men. This matter concerned women, and therefore was just not worth the time. It was in that single moment she became a radical proponent of the ERA (Sonia Johnson, From Housewife to Heretic, 1980; Mormon Land episode 228, “Sonia Johnson and Kate Kelly on their excommunications and the long fight for the ERA,” April 6, 2022).

Now, many Mormon feminists know this story. They celebrate it. They know that Sonia Johnson, the woman sitting in that room, would go on to be excommunicated in 1979 after she publicly took on her church and a US Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, when she addressed the Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee in 1978 (University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women’s Legacy Archive, “Sonia Johnson”). Her church would not stand for a woman defending the ERA and openly defying them. And neither would her husband. In a betrayal by her husband, he took his church’s side, and divorced Johnson.

Many Mormon feminists have read her memoir of the ordeal, From Housewife to Heretic. If they are especially interested, they know about the hunger strike Johnson went on with fellow ERA proponents in Illinois to ratify the amendment in the state. They know that she paid to fly a banner in support of the ERA in Salt Lake City for LDS General Conference or that she chained herself to an LDS temple. They might even know that she ran for president in 1984 with an impressive showing.

But most stop there.

The ERA wasn’t ratified. Johnson didn’t become president. And she faded from public and Mormon view. Her story tends to end there.

In fact, Johnson is still alive today, and did a Mormon Land interview in 2022 (you can listen here). Her politics and life are still solidified into a life between 1977 and 1984, and at no point in the interview does it come up to ask about Johnson’s lesbian politic. In that interview, the Mormon Land hosts talk with her and with Kate Kelly. Kelly’s excommunication is also discussed, as well as the fact that Kelly continued on with the Mormons for the ERA and attempts to ratify the ERA again over the past decade. The two even happened to have been excommunicated in the same building. That is discussed. But the fact that two lesbian Mormons with a lesbian politic are sitting there doesn’t seem to be relevant enough to discuss at all.

I actually don’t blame one of the interviewers, Peggy Fletcher Stack, because Stack was one of the people to uncover what even happened to Johnson after all these years in an interview she did in 2019 titled, “40 years after her Mormon excommunication, ERA firebrand Sonia Johnson salutes today’s ‘wonderful’ women, says men ‘bore’ her” (Stack, Salt Lake Tribune, January 18, 2019).

It was Peggy Fletcher Stack’s article where Johnson’s life continues on past 1984 and into the present for public view. It is in this article that the public can see what a lesbian politic entails. After the ERA wasn’t ratified, after the failed presidential bid, Johnson retreated to New Mexico to a lesbian compound run by women who entered partnerships — and marriages, as outlined in their anti-state politic — with other women.

We must keep in mind that when Johnson lost the election and began her life in lesbian communalism, it was before 1993, and therefore before third-wave feminism and the pivotal and groundbreaking work of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, on lesbian politics and the introduction of gender and queer theory. So Johnson’s lesbian politic can be forgiven of lacking nuance around gender and sex as categories of difference.

As a nonbinary and trans masc lesbian, I have a nuanced approach to men and masculinity. This means that a full-blown lesbian feminist separatist movement — creating a separate political arrangement that does not include men — does not jive with me. But it is important to recognize that without Sonia Johnson, there really is no substantial Mormon lesbian feminist role model for Mormon lesbian feminists. What we are stuck with is just a long — unending — line of cishet feminists complicit in heteronormativity and advancers of compulsory heterosexuality.

But Johnson kept writing.

Many Mormon feminists will read her work From Housewife to Heretic and stop there. In part because Johnson’s writing became deeply politically lesbian, and it even became confrontational to lesbian sexuality itself which is compelling, but no one engages in those specific problems with it… because no one reads those works. Her writing also developed and outlined an anti-state lesbian politic. Right now, in Mormon feminism, there is no other standout anti-state lesbian writing other than Johnson. If you are a Mormon feminist and have an anti-state lesbian politic, this is the only body of work out there, and it is very difficult to find in an ethically-sourced way, so Amazon it is. Johnson’s books are out of print. The copy of Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation I got my hands on is a signed copy of the book I found for less than $10. I’m still waiting for my copy of The Ship that Sailed into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered to arrive. It has taken a month to locate and also cost less than $10.

This is what Wikipedia says about Going Out of Our Minds: “Johnson details the personal and the political experiences that turned her against the state, including her run for the Presidency. In the book, she rejects the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, equal opportunity laws, and other government benefits because she considers them cooptation by patriarchy,” (Wikipedia, “Sonia Johnson”).

There is plenty in her works that I reject. I reject that sexuality is something to overcome. I reject her separatism. But she has the only anti-state Mormon lesbian politic out there, and her ideas are worthwhile to another anti-state lesbian feminist who has craved something, anything from Mormon feminism resembling this.

Mormon Feminism’s Compulsory Heterosexuality

Just before Johnson came on the scene, there was a group of academically-minded women contributing substantially to a second-wave Mormon feminism of their own. They came together in 1970 to discuss feminism and apply a Mormon lens to the second-wave feminist movement. These women were well-educated; they were doctors themselves, teaching, becoming doctors, and married to doctors; they were also devoutly Mormon. In Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s retelling of this history in her article “Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism” for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2010, she tells that by June of that year, the women of the group had organized to produce a special issue of Dialogue, which is now referred to as the “Pink Issue,” (Ulrich, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010).

The group of women wanted to address what they claimed was a “double-bind,” (Ulrich, 48). They did not feel welcomed into the Women’s Lib movement because of their conservative and religious background yet they were part of and helping to construct a Women’s Lib and second-wave feminism nonetheless. They were excluded twice, they claimed, once by the patriarchal institutions they were a part of, including their church, and the Women’s Lib movement as well.

That is one way to frame that history, one that centers women with a lot of power among women within their congregations. But these women did not part ways from the patriarchal institution of their church to favor minority women, in particular, the lesbians.

In fact, this is what another of the women in the group, Claudia Bushman, had to say in response to controversy over the group’s conservative position, a point repeated by Ulrich in this article: “Although we sometimes refer to ourselves as the L.D.S. cell of Women’s Lib, we claim no affiliation with any of those militant bodies and some of us are so straight as to be shocked by their antics,” Ulrich and Bushman both added that they did, however, “read their literature with interest,” (Ulrich 49-50; Claudia Lauper Bushman, “Women in Dialogue: An Introduction,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought vol. 6, Summer 1971, 5).

The word “straight” here definitionally doesn’t necessarily mean that it is being used in opposition to gay, but the word “militant” is a dog whistle and stand-in for lesbian, as has already been noted above, so using the word “straight” here is tongue-in-cheek to let those who know, know. This group doesn’t want any lesbians.

It is hard, then, for me to take seriously the claim that this group represents a “double-bind.” The double-bind they represent is that they wanted to continue with their comphet unimpeded by homosexuality and queerness, and they wanted to do it without questioning.

As Bushman continued to describe the group, she said, “We spend no time railing at men,” (we remember that “man-hating” is also a dog whistle for “lesbians”), “In general, members affirm the family as the basic unit of society and hope to work out strong partnerships with husbands to provide the best possible upbringing for their children,” (Bushman, 6).

This group openly did not want to be a part of Women’s Lib, because they did not want to be labeled or seen as “militant,” “man-haters,” they didn’t want to be labeled with such a slur as “lesbians.”

They believed that “[w]hile doctrinally it is perfectly clear that wives should support their husbands, indeed are pledged to them as their husbands are pledged to the Lord, and that having children and lots of children is a good rather than a bad thing, we question whether these priorities preclude other varieties of behavior,” (Bushman, 6-7). This description and compliance in it is the definition of compulsory heterosexuality.

By 1974, this group would found the largest, most well-established Mormon feminist group and publication: Exponent II. Their words represented the foundational texts to second-wave Mormon feminism, and they defended that position again in 2010 when it was repeated in Ulrich’s article. The message is clear: from the time it was outlined by second-wave Mormon feminists to 2010, lesbians are not welcome in Mormon feminism.

So is it any wonder that a lesbian, such as myself, cannot find themselves represented — or even acknowledged — in Mormon feminism?

Then to Now

This insidious lesbophobia has been maintained in Mormon feminism since 1970. It remained when Sonia Johnson changed her politics to a lesbian politic, which is why her lesbian politic is never discussed in Mormon feminism, only her housewife persona.

The legacy of this lesbophobia outlines that only those women — and I mean cis and heterosexual women — with power in Mormonism get to define what Mormon feminism is and what it looks like. It means that “Women on the Stand” is the avenue Mormon feminism is now following, and it must be followed if you want to be a Mormon feminist, because vying for the same power as men in Mormonism is what Mormon feminism looks like, not challenging that power altogether.

It means that we celebrate cis women’s bodies, and the history of cishet Mormon women. We enshrine biological determinism, as evidenced by the primary idol of Mormon feminism being “the womb.” It demands that those with gender dysphoria around our bodies or who are women without cis bodies be removed from Mormon feminism too.

It means that we must worship a Heavenly Mother, or be counted as anti-Mormon-feminist and our voices be suppressed because we aren’t heeling to the mainstream Mormon feminist will.

When I challenged the reliance of Mormon feminists on Heavenly Mother, I was dismissed at best and shunned at worst by prominent Mormon feminists of our day. But let me just leave you with this quote I found in that book Sonia Johnson had literally signed her name to, that book that isn’t found on Mormon feminists’ shelves, though it should be right next to their copy of From Housewife to Heretic.

I read it and gasped. It was a confirmation to me of the lesbophobia still running Mormon feminism:

“While I was still in the Church, however, belief in Mother in Heaven provided a transition for me from Father-god to god-within, and I was learning that before there was God, there was the Goddess. But I had no desire to go back to ancient Goddess religion. I rapidly rejected the notion of putting a skirt on God, calling him ‘the Goddess,’ and worshipping essentially the same sort of being, enwrapped in dogma and hierarchical trappings. God in drag is still God.” (Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation, 1987, p. 6).

God in drag is still God is the bumper sticker I need.

This work of Johnson’s, this work that was written the year after I was born, but a work that has been erased from the history of Mormon feminism, this work was the first time I found myself in Mormon feminism, the first time I knew I belonged in a space that has a long history of erasing those like me. It was the first time that I knew, without question, I have something to offer to Mormon feminism that Mormon feminists have yet to grapple with.

Because this work was so significant to me, and because this book is so difficult to find ethically, I will put the rest of this quote from Johnson:

“Yet I speak of the Goddess often, lovingly, and carry the image of her in my mind, an image that helps me counter the image of male deity which still insinuates itself in a dozen ways into my psychic landscape. I know that Goddess ritual, insofar as it generates reverence for and celebrates that which is female, which is us, is fiercely empowering, and that her image in our minds — images of ourselves as deity — is necessary as a blueprint for a more authoritative mode of being in the world. The Goddess is a metaphor for our own and all women’s creative, healing, transformative powers, a representation of our inner selves … But she must remain consciously metaphorical and only metaphorical or we risk externalizing and losing our power again, we risk relinquishing responsibility of our lives again. Even with the Goddess established securely in our minds only as metaphor, we must be careful to avoid participation in any Goddess rituals or events that stress our helplessness, our need to be rescued or to be dependent on strong spiritual leaders, rituals which encourage self-indulgent emotionalism or involve us in thought-less theatrics. Genuine spirituality for women will always have its foundation in a radical feminist analysis. Feminism is spirituality. But it is not ‘religion.’ It is about the rising of the spirit of half the human race. It is the foundation of the women’s movement which is the greatest spiritual revolution in world history, producing globally the most profoundly transformative human change ever wrought.” (Johnson, 6-7).

I don’t wish to sit on the same stand as the men who have determined themselves to be mini-gods. I want a Mormon feminism that does more, that carves out more, that builds something Mormon and therefore truly peculiar.

Surely, there must be room for those anti-state, anti-hierarchy, imaginative feminist anarchist ideas within the bounds of Mormon feminism.

Surely.

Because Sonia already outlined them for us.

Sonia Johnson shows me that, no, I do not have to sit patiently by in Mormon spaces and wait for Mormon feminism to renounce its lesbophobia and queerphobia. I don’t have to sit in spaces where Mormon feminists outline why a belief in Heavenly Mother automatically includes queer people, simply because a cishet Mormon woman said it does. I don’t have to wait for Mormon feminism to catch up to gender and queer theory. I get to participate and make Mormon feminism what it is as much as those spouting lesbophobia.

It was when I realized I was relinquishing my nonbinary lesbian power to a more mainstream Mormon feminist narrative that I remembered the 1984 speech from the ultimate lesbian feminist, Audre Lorde, as she spoke to UC Berkley about how second-wave feminism left so many behind.

Her words for her speech, the one in which she famously titled “The Master’s Tools Willl Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” are so powerful, I will include a large chunk here:

“I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women ‘who attempt to emancipate themselves ay perhaps too high a price for the results,’ as this paper states. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.”

Sonia Johnson and Audre Lorde have so much to offer Mormon feminism, if only Mormon feminists will listen.

And to the Mormon feminists out there digging into gender and queer theory, who are making attempts to address queer issues and the problems with the nuclear family primary model, to those who see, hear, and listen to queers and people of color, you are doing the work, but you’re already at a disadvantage, because the second-wave Mormon feminist project has done such a good job erasing the lesbian or queer politic. Don’t perpetuate this problem. Confront it.

To the lesbians, all the women-loving-women, the queers: we are allowed to take up this mantle and take up space. Our time is now. Let’s go be radical.

This type of feminist work is meant for those of all genders, including men, to find themselves somehow represented.

This piece was inspired by a conversation I had with a queer BYU thought-producer, academic, queer activist, and my friend Calvin Burke, who challenged me to lean into the “peculiarity” of Mormonism. I am here for that process, but I have deeply held convictions for why I disagree with celebrating two of the most peculiar parts of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon and the embodiment of deity.

I’m going to outline Joseph Smith’s adoption of three European movements into Mormonism (ethnonationalism, scientific racism, and socialism) and why I think it is imperative that we reject the first two and their influence on Joseph Smith’s ideas.

Ethnonationalism

I’m going to start with a slightly new historicization of The Book of Mormon.

Despite the myths we tell about Joseph Smith, he did not merely exist in a vacuum, unread, and untethered from the world around him. The Book of Mormon was written and published in a very specific historical moment between 1827 and 1830. Usually, historians place the writing within the American historical context of the Second Great Awakening which began in the “burned-over District” in Western New York, the birthplace of Mormonism. Historian and religious studies scholar Matthew W. Dougherty outlined the links between The Book of Mormon and US nationalist mythmaking in their work Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America. Dougherty does an excellent job outlining how nationalism was rooted in racializing practices in the first years of the United States as a federal state. They provide an abundance of evidence that nationalist race construction was being conducted by a number of religious people, including Mormons and Joseph Smith, Jewish and Indigenous co-creators. They also do a great job outlining just how new a concept state governments run by “the people” were and how many of those “the people” embraced the concept that they could co-create a nationalist outlook alongside anyone else. Though these co-creations were ultimately rejected by the larger white supremacist, successful nationalist mythmaking projects.

I wish to put The Book of Mormon and its ethnonationalism into a much larger historical context.

The concept of ‘countries,’ despite how normalized they’ve become, is not, in fact, a natural one. It is important to understand just how radical it was FOR EUROPEANS to construct a state run by “the people” at the end of the 18th century. I emphasize it in this way, because European Americans were not the first to construct governments and states this way, and it is now well known that many of the ideas derived from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Shortly after the American Revolution, the French had their own successful Revolution, and a French state(s) was created. The American and French states looked very different, and many consider the French Revolution the most important of the liberal movements.

Both these revolutions were radically new and not yet tested. They also excluded people from participation in their governments, namely non-white ethnic and racial groups, women, and the non-elite, although the French Revolution has long been heralded for its inclusion of Jewish communities in the territories of France. The United States was not constructed on a “homeland” and so that nationalist mythmaking took the form of Manifest Destiny - the belief that the United States was given to European white people as land with a divine destiny to conquer land and displace, remove, exterminate people who challenged that white supremacist project — as the official nationalist narrative trumping other mythmaking prospects like that of Joseph Smith’s.

Joseph Smith’s nationalist myth was not a new one, it had been thrown about for a century or more, that Indigenous people whose land and Indigenous home are Turtle Island were descendants of a lost tribe of Israelites. Mormon historian Fawn M. Brodie, biographer of Joseph Smith, pointed to the similarities between The Book of Mormon and the book View of the Hebrews which was published in 1823 and proposed that Indigenous people to the land that is now the United States were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Brodie and others show this to be a common belief in the early 19th century (Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 1945).

As a scholar of European nationalism, this isn’t really surprising to me. I see it as a project of European Americans to fit into the larger European ethnonationalist projects, especially in the 1820s.

While most people know and understand the state-building projects of the United States and France, the next biggest European nationalist project was Greece. This is the first political project we call “ethnonationalist” because, on its face, it was designed to relocated Greeks across the world, but especially across Europe, to an invented “homeland” called Greece.

Prominent Greek merchants and political agitators formed a secret society, Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends), in the city of Odesa on the Black Sea, what was then the Russian Empire and is now contemporary Ukraine. Greeks — people sharing some sort of consistent ethnic identity — have lived in Odesa for millennia, starting with the Greek colonization of the city in 6th century BCE. This group, among others and with British, French, and American imperial support, began educating and agitating. All these groups started educating using ancient classical texts about ancient Greeks to form a cohesive political movement built on an idea that the Greeks in the ancient texts were the same as contemporary Greeks and they needed to take over their “homeland.” As a scholar of these movements on the Black Sea, this is laughable, considering the person leading this secret society and this “nationalist consciousness” movement was a Greek man whose family descended from Pontic Greeks (Greeks who had lived in Greek port cities/former Greek colonies dotting the entire coastal circumference of the Black Sea), was a subject of the Ottoman Empire who had given his family domination over the Danubian Principalities (aka Romania), was a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian army where he lost his arm, and had never lived in the place that he was agitating for as the Greek “homeland.” His only connection to this so-called “homeland” were through specific readings of ancient texts about where “Greece” “was.”

But this political project was not actually a “nationalist consciousness” awakening. It was a British, French, and Russian imperialist project to weaken the most prominent and oldest European empire: the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire is rarely considered a European empire, despite the fact that it included territory, at times, all the way to Vienna — more of Europe than Alexander the Great’s empire — and its seat was Constantinople (Istanbul), which is Europe. The reason it is rarely considered European is because it was a Muslim Empire, and Europeans have a long history of Islamophobia. These European empires sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire through supporting a Greek nationalist project to take over a large part of Ottoman territory — contemporary Greece — displace the Turks living there and call for Greeks across Europe to occupy the land “of their ancestors.”

This is the first ethnonationalist project to weaponize ancient history texts to remove people from their lands and replace them with another ethnic group.

And this war, the Greek war of Independence as it is called, started in 1821 and lasted until 1829. The Book of Mormon, again, was written between 1827 and 1830. These ethnonationalist projects are inextricably linked.

As a side note, the next biggest ethnonationalist project which proposed taking more Ottoman lands and expelling Muslims was that of Israel. This is the political weaponization of ancient history called Zionism. It seems no wonder that Orson Hyde visited Palestine in 1841 to bless the land for the gathering of Israel — saying “Now, O Lord! Thy servant has been obedient to the heavenly vision which Thou gavest him in his native land, and under the shadow of Thine outstretched arm, he has safely arrived in this place to dedicate and consecrate this land unto Thee, for the gathering together of Judah’s scattered remnants, according to the predictions of the holy prophets…” — as part of this European, Islamophobic, violent takeover of Indigenous lands and communities. (Special thanks to nic at the Instagram account unsettling_mormonism for educating me on Hyde’s visit.)

European settler-colonizers in the United States during the Greek War of Independence were obsessed with the Greek cause. Thomas Jefferson said about it, “No people sympathise more feelingly than ours with the sufferings of your countrymen, none offer more sincere and ardent prayers to heaven for their success: and nothing indeed but the fundamental principle of our government, never to entangle us with the broils of Europe, could restrain our generous youth from taking some part in this holy cause.”

But the people most enthralled with the drama unfolding in Greece were New Yorkers who were captured in what New York newspapers called “Greek fever,” (Theodosios Karvounarakis, “The United States Government and the Greek War of Independence,” 2022).

This Greek War of Independence was truly horrific, with the brutal slaughtering of Greeks by the Ottomans, and of Turks in “Greece” by Greek revolutionaries. Despite the fact that the Ottoman Empire had been, before this, more historically inclusive of religious practices than any other place in Europe, with the largest city in all of Europe dedicated to displaced Jews, Thessaloniki, Greece, Ottomans targeted Greeks in Constantinople (Istanbul) and then targeted specifically Greek Christian Orthodox ecclesiastics, bishops, and monasteries for brutal executions. Greeks tortured Turks in much the same way.

But for the European Americans watching on, what caught their attention was the treatment of Christians by Ottoman forces, giving Christians in the United States a religious crusade to rally for.

The Greek crusade against Islam and the Manifest Destiny crusade against Indigenous people of Turtle Island are part of the same brutalizing project, and The Book of Mormon was meant to aid both fronts.

With all of this historical context and evidence, I simply cannot participate in the perpetuation of The Book of Mormon as an ancient text to promote this and uniquely terrible project of Christian imperialist ethnonationalism. So, for me, celebrating the peculiarity of The Book of Mormon is out.

Scientific Racism

Part of these ethnonationalist and nationalist projects was to decide who “the people” were in these governments run by “the people.” Surely, not all people could be included in such projects. But proponents of these political projects had to make a “reasoned” argument for why some people could participate and others could not. Ultimately, the nationalist and ethnonationalist political projects turned to newly formed state institutions to find “scientific” reasons for why some people could participate and others had to be politically excluded from the process.

This is the historical context in which scientific racism developed. Scientific racism, also known as biological racism, is a pseudoscience set of methodologies meant to prove a racial hierarchy to justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, and racial superiority. It is not considered scientific today, though every day I read new medical articles about the ways that scientific racism persists in contemporary medicine. (Here is an article published last week about scientific racism determining who gets a kidney transplant and who does not.)

Modern medicine, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology all developed out of scientific racism and scientists still have a hard time pulling out the elements of it that still exist in those disciplines. Anthropology was particularly egregious, as it was developed for the sole purpose of creating a racial hierarchy. Anthropology also introduced the debunked pseudoscientific method of craniometry, which measured skull size to determine the relationship between skull size and racial/sex/gender categories to make inferences about intellectual capabilities.

Scientific racism, again, developed in Europe and has its foundations as early as the 17th century as Europeans attempted to justify slavery. By the 19th century, it was used to justify political exclusion of some people from “the people.”

One of the keep supporters of scientific racism in the development of the United States was none other than the same Thomas Jefferson. For context, Jefferson died in 1826, the year before Joseph Smith started production of The Book of Mormon. Of course Jefferson was a proponent of scientific racism. As the literal author of liberty, he had to find a reason his version of liberty explicitly excluded his slaves. In one McGill Journal of Medicine article, Joel Garrod claims, “One of the most influential pre-Darwinian racial theorists, Jefferson’s call for science to determine the obvious ‘inferiority’ of African Americans is an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism,” (Joel Z. Garrod, “A Brave Old World: An Analysis of Scientific Racism and BiDil,” 2006).

It was at nearly the same time that Jefferson and Europeans were developing scientific racism for the political exclusion of races that the field of psychology was developed in 1808 in Germany with the publication of History of Psychology, (Adrian C. Brock, “History of the History of Psychology, 2020). Psychology proved useful in pathologizing women for the purpose of excluding them from participating in politics, but also from denying their bodily autonomy, later in the 19th century resulting in them being routinely locked in institutions due to disagreeing with their husbands, (Kate Moore, “Declared Insane for Speaking Up: The Dark American History of Silencing Women Through Psychiatry,” 2021).

Additionally, the same way that racialized bodies were being categorized by craniometry and other racist science, women’s bodies were as well. The distinction between men’s bodies and women’s bodies were being mapped at the same time. As racist scientists were creating distinctions between white men’s bodies and Black men’s bodies, they were simultaneous arguing that the distinction between Black men’s bodies and Black women’s bodies were hardly noticeable, and that a major difference between the white race and the Black race was how much easier it was to distinguish men’s bodies from women’s bodies in the white race (Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire, 2007). White men were men; white women were women; and African Americans were merely Black (Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990). Part of this belief derives from the fact that there are plenty of African and Indigenous cultures who do not find there to be enough significant different between men and women, just as there is not enough scientific evidence to determine there are significant biological differences between races, which is scientifically and biologically true (Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, 1997). We MUST recognize that the medical and legal sex binary is absolutely tied to white supremacy.

The process of reducing the differences between sexes and races to biological factors is called biological essentialism or biological determinism, and we should at least be skeptical of it and at most reject it entirely.

Just as the sex binary is linked to scientific racism, claiming that heterosexuality and the nuclear family are products of “normalcy” and therefore products of whiteness (Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940, 2007). Here I can now mention that scientific racism developed into a distinct medical movement called eugenics in the United States which worked to promote reproduction in white America to produce more white people and literally sterilize women of color, a practice picked up by Nazi Germany for the extermination of Jews, Roma, socialists and disabled and socially unacceptable people (Wikipedia article, “Eugenics.”)

This is the historical moment when “the body” becomes a really crucial and important historical object to be used as a political tool for political exclusion. And it so happens that Joseph Smith was creating an embodied, materialist God at the same time. Again, the historical context plays a crucial role in Smith’s determinations.

Once you start seeing the ways in which Smith was infusing scientific racism into his theology, it is easy to see how he took these racial hierarchies to the extreme by creating a race of (white) gods. It is for this reason that I often say that no matter what color we depict Heavenly Mother, she will always represent white supremacy — a white supremacy that also led to the silencing and harming women, much like a silent Heavenly Mother, I might add — at least until we openly agonize over how to rid Mormonism of its white supremacy.

There are two things that make Mormonism peculiar that I think reject European racism and imperialism, and often stand at odds with the rest of Mormonism because of it: socialism and polygamy. Socialism does so explicitly with its explicit anti-racism and anti-imperialist ideology. Polygamy does so implicitly (and also it does so VERY poorly) with its rejection of the nuclear family and its development of an alternative kinship network.

Socialism

Let me preface this section with the following disclaimer. I lump polygamy in with socialism because I think Mormon polygamy derives from a poor interpretation of socialist kinship networks. I am not a proponent of Mormon polygamy or a Mormon polygamist apologist, but I am a proponent of finding alternative solutions to European and American white supremacy’s cisheteronormativity, cisheteropatriarchy, and the nuclear family. Mormon polygamy resulted in a reproduction of the worst parts of European and American patriarchy, and it also politically subverted the carefully crafted European settler-colonial, white supremacist narrative that white people practice the best version of cisheterosexual reproduction within nuclear families. It was SO subversive that American settler-colonists had to claim that Mormons were a different race in order to keep their white supremacist pseudoscience intact (Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, 2015). And Mormons could not re-enter the United States until they had denounced polygamy and reclaimed their whiteness.

As a queer person, it is actually easy for me to understand why white Mormon feminists can so easily identify the patriarchy in Mormon polygamy, but why it is much harder for them to identify the white supremacy which drives their desire to not critically engage with the nuclear family as an ideal.

But this section is about Joseph Smith’s European socialism. So what does any of this have to do with socialism?

First thing we have to do is to define socialism, which is impossible, but I’m going to try anyway.

Socialism is a constellation of movements and beliefs. I think it is accurate to say there are as many different socialist movements as there are socialists. I think it is safe to say that socialism is a reactionary political, social, and economic theory and movement, in that it is reacting to the capitalist problems which developed in the midst of the (multiple) industrial revolutions in Europe. Keeping in mind that capitalism is also a political, social, and economic theory. As a reactionary movement, socialism is anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchy, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. Now, to what extent each socialist theory and movement rejects capitalism, imperialism, and racism and which of the three is most emphasized is very different across all socialist movements.

Now, even the definition I just presented is controversial, anti-Marxist even, because I situate it in a very specific time and place: Europe during and after the industrial revolutions. Marx believes socialism has always existed. I reject that Marxist definition of socialism and think it comes from a flawed and Eurocentric (imperialist even!) Marxist idea of historical materialism.

So we are going to accept that socialism is impossible to define, but we are also going to adopt this definition for our purposes here. I will also acknowledge this is a convenient definition for arguing that Joseph Smith adopted European socialism :)

Joseph Smith was born only thirteen years before Karl Marx, but socialism didn’t start with Marx. The first big industrialization of Europe began in 1760 and didn’t end until around the death of Smith, who was assassinated in 1844. This means that Smith’s entire life took place in the this European industrialization process, and from the beginning of that industrialization process, there were political and social agitators fighting, primarily, for workers’ rights and humanity. The process of industrialization was a literal dehumanizing process, meaning that people with wealth and power no longer valued human labor and replaced humans with machine labor. We will call these people with wealth and power capitalists for our purposes (for a great example of how the industrialization process continues today and how capitalism continues to dehumanize people, here is a clip from The Daily Show last week about capitalists pushing AI).

I have not delved deep enough into the Joseph Smith Papers to accurately tell you how socialism creeped into Smith’s Mormonism, but the evidence it did is blatant.

Let’s pause to say you can be a capitalist socialist, an imperialist socialist, a hierarchal socialist, and a racist socialist. In fact, because socialism is reactionary, it almost guarantees these concepts will invade socialism, because they are borne out of capitalism, imperialism, and racism.

In Joseph Smith’s case, I think I’ve made a worthwhile argument above that Smith embraced scientific racism, but he also welcomed Black people into his church and ensured they were entitled to his priesthood (see Paul Reeve’s project: Century of Black Mormons). I would argue there isn’t a human alive who has been exposed to European imperialism that doesn’t harbor an internal racism and anti-racism at the same time. “Racist” is not a binary descriptor. It isn’t that you are “racist” or “anti-racist,” it is how much of each you cultivate in yourself, or in the case of socialism, in the movement you represent.

So is Smith’s Mormonism anti-racist because it allowed Black men to hold the priesthood? I would say no, because it would require Smith to be conscious of racism and its detriments, which given the racism that fueled the foundational text of Mormonism, I don’t believe there is any good evidence he had any sort of anti-racist consciousness, and if he did, it certainly did not include anti-Indigenous racism. Did his polygamy and eventual community challenge European settler-colonial racism? Yeah, it did, but again, not in any sort of conscious way, and if he was race conscious, I think Smith and his followers would try to lean more into white supremacy than away from it.

Was Smith’s Mormonism anti-imperialist? I mean, again, it is difficult to parse out. He actively fought against the United States and state government. He had his own militia. He also ran for President of the United States. He did not actively cooperate with Indigenous imperial resistance either. However, I don’t know that this prevents a movement from being labeled socialist. Marx was wildly pro-imperialism and we still call him a socialist. Stalin himself was absolutely an imperialist in socialist clothing, and honestly there is no redeeming that guy, but can we say that he wasn’t a socialist? It would be hard to argue that. And for the record, I find the dogmatic communist and Stalinist apologists just as untrustworthy, “bad faith,” and problematic as the dogmatic Joseph Smith apologists.

Honestly, I’ve spent several years now writing a dissertation about Romanian socialism and I always end up at this same point: No person nor any movement is politically and ideologically consistent. It is hard to reduce a person or movement to one thing, one side of binary opposites, especially a reactionary person or movement. I find that more honest and even more exciting that binary interpretations, but it also makes it impossible to talk about in anyway that makes sense.

It is easier — and even more politically urgent? — to say that Joseph Smith and his Mormonism are racist than to unpack what that means. It is easier — and perhaps more politically urgent? — to say Mormon polygamy is bad than it is to unpack the nuances of racial and gender power dynamics.

Now, even though socialism, I think, depends on political urgency, I think it is worthwhile to unpack these things rather than be simply reductionist for the political movement’s sake.

But if we are to examine the practicality of Smith’s Mormonism’s socialism rather than its ideological framework, we will piece together a practical socialist model.

Because Smith is uniquely anti-hierarchal. And we can see the inconsistency of Smith’s hierarchy and anti-hierarchy best modeled in the Instagram firestorm last month resulting from the recent talk by Anette Dennis. Dennis said, “There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women. There are religions that ordain some women to positions such as priests and pastors, but very few relative to the number of women in their congregations receive that authority,” (I’m going to link the Deseret News article here, because I’m going to argue a position that both supports and denounces this statement, and I think most people reading this understand my denunciation, but the support might be new.) This is actually a really fascinating statement because it highlights the patriarchal hierarchy and the socialist anti-hierarchy built simultaneously in Mormonism without flushing it out and, let’s saw it how it is, depleted of any sort of intellectual analysis. Such a statement simultaneously accidently supports Mormonism’s socialism and denies patriarchy in one swoop, which is just wildly ignorant and hilarious.

In most socialist movements, there is a desire to create anti-hierarchal communities to match the political and social moral value of anti-hierarchy. I think it is one of the most difficult tasks in socialist political movements, because often hierarchies arise just because people are so accustomed to them and look to what they know. But Mormonism, especially, Smith’s pre-Brigham Mormonism is uniquely anti-hierarchal. And that is what Dennis was tapping into in her talk. Mormonism, on the ground practically, is a socialist movement where every man has the same priesthood and where the congregations are operated by a lay clergy, meaning any man can hold any position of power without any special training or relationship to God. In Smith’s Mormonism, even the prophet was subject to criticism from lay leaders.

At the same time, these opportunities are only afforded to men, making it also deeply patriarchal… as in a hierarchy of pater, or “father,” in Greek. So when Dennis says to us, “Look! We have no hierarchies!” while ignoring the arguably most oppressive hierarchy in Mormonism, is just… hilarious.

At the same time, as a socialist, I am deeply sympathetic to a movement that can offer a long-term historical model of anti-hierarchy. That being said, the twentieth-century capitalist political movement inside Mormonism to consolidate power in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency feels incredibly blasphemous to Smith’s socialist Mormonism. And the fact that Dennis ignored the chokehold these power-crazed church leaders have placed on the institution feels more treacherous than humorous.

The Mormonism that rules at the local level better resembles Smith’s socialist vision, where welfare, mutual aid, and community care are cultivated for the sake of humanizing congregants, and is, I want to really argue and emphasize, worth preserving and replicating.

Smith’s Mormonism, if stripped of The Book of Mormon and the problematic theological beliefs and if wrestled away from the political monopolization of power by the twentieth-century-created capitalist hierarchy, could offer an actual socialist model to improve upon.

Finally, we must ask if Smith’s Mormonism is anti-capitalist. From the perspective of tithing, community service, and rejection of wealth, we could say so, but this also has been hijacked by a power- and wealth-hungry Mormon elite.

It is for this reason that suggest we reject the lawsuit by James Huntsman to return his tithing money. As a socialist model, Mormon tithing offers socialist insights into how to care for community. We must learn from the corruption that can seep into socialist movements rather than reject them altogether. So often we are too focused on revolution and utter destruction of systems. Marx never taught us how to look for socialist systems in place, only to burn the place down. In the case of Mormon tithing, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment and notice how this system of community care has worked for so long and, again, improve upon it. As a socialist, I cannot support the capitalist exploitation Huntsman built his fortune on by supporting his reclamation of funds from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Instead, I offer that we, “the people,” “the workers,” whatever you want to call us, those who have contributed to a stash of $100 billion should have the power to decide how to distribute those funds in a fair and socialist manner. We should wrestle it back from a corrupt and greedy capitalist hierarchy.

This entire article is an argument for a socialist revolution in Mormonism, a redistribution of OUR funds, a re-centering on community care rather than metaphysical belief.

If we truly want a socialist revolution, there is an excellent chance to learn really important lessons from Mormonism’s socialism and the problems that face community builders.

The twentieth-century anti-communist movement in Mormonism robbed us of our socialist foundations. It is time we reclaimed them and reclaimed what is ours, not all of this racist belief, but community care, mutual aid… socialism.

I will tell you right upfront that this is, at its core, an introduction to queer theory. It won’t seem like it at first, but we will get there. It’s a story that offers an alternative perspective of Mormon feminist history of the last three decades and gives us a glimpse of where we stand now and why, and why it’s a problem. I will acknowledge that this is a piece centered on a particular branch of professional Mormon scholars in the fields of history and feminism, and it is much messier than the mythic narrative we Mormon feminists tell ourselves, just as Feminism has always been messy, heartbreaking, and, quite frankly, exclusionary.

In this piece, I have adopted the recent feminist approach to talk about feminisms rather than Feminism, and this story outlines an argument for why we should do so and why it suits me, a nonbinary lesbian Mormon, better. Rather than asking whether Feminism is a noble endeavor, we can ask ourselves which feminism works when and why.

Intro to Critical Theory

I came into gender theory by accident and through the backdoor. I did not come to feminism, or to self-identify as a feminist, until multiple years after I identified as a gender theorist. Partly that was for the same reasons I still do not wish to identify as a Mormon feminist until one particular, budding Mormon feminism comes into mainstream discourse, a Mormon feminism that adequately deals with cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy. We aren’t there yet. But I looks like we might be on that path.

I accidently found myself engaged in gender theory after coming through the critical race theory backdoor. This isn’t a unique experience for queer people, and later we will see why. Like almost all the far-right talking heads who bash critical race theory today, when I arrived at it, I didn’t know what it was or how to recognize it. So let’s briefly outline a bit of critical race theory history so we are all on the same page, since there is much too much misinformation on the topic out there. Unfortunately, even Wikipedia is a poor source about this history (but the Wikipedia article on critical theory more generally is a good source). Critical race theory is part of a larger project called critical theory.

Critical theory was developed within a small community of scholars in Frankfurt, Germany at the Institute of Research, later called the Frankfurt School, in 1923. By the 1930s, this group of scholars began to outline fears about the three social structures in Germany they saw as dangerous: fascism, capitalism, and Marxist-Leninist Communism. This is where things get a bit confusing if you don’t have a background in European history or the history of socialism. These scholars were confronting the rise of fascism on the one hand, and as Marxist socialists, they also saw a newer, poorly managed Marxist-Leninist Communism of the Soviet Union as incredibly dangerous. When far-right politicians and other fearmongers denounce critical theory as Marxist, they use “Marxism” as a dog whistle without ever having to explain what Marxism is or why it is dangerous. They rely on all our Cold War education to stoke fear at the mention of the word, and they don’t recognize that not all Marxisms are the same. But an explicit goal of the Institute of Research was to find an alternative to Marxist-Leninism. By 1933, and the rise of Nazism, the scholars moved their Institute to Switzerland and then, in 1935, to Columbia University in New York. This is really where these social theories began to develop through academic circles in the United States. The theories also expanded across Europe as well, and in France in particular, which is how we get the critical theory of people like Foucault and Derrida, the latter being a recent Mormon favorite, and you likely didn’t even know it (see below).

If we were to reduce critical theory and its theories on society to one simple idea, it is that we should implement social change and “intellectual emancipation” for all dogmatic assumptions about how the world, people, and social structures operate (Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 1937). Which in simpler terms is to say that we can’t take any assumptions about the world around us as natural. We must question all of those assumptions. Critical theory often also has an active element: we should critique systems of power AND we should work to dismantle them.

But when I came to critical theory, I didn’t know any of that. And I didn’t know how to recognize critical theory when it smacked me in the face. Remember, though, that critical theory helps us question the assumptions we are presented with in the world as if they are truth, especially as it is implemented through power structures. This is called social construction. And what critical theorists expose is the ways in which society has constructed systems of power, systems of manipulation, systems of oppression. So when we are studying the social construction of race, for example, we are not merely talking about a history of people of color, we are talking about the ways in which white supremacy constructs concepts of race in order to keep certain people from accessing power. It is not that race is an inherent or biological concept; it is constructed in order to keep people from accessing power, specifically by building nations and laws that limit the participation of certain people.

Like me, you likely didn’t know you have also been introduced to critical theory and it likely impacts your everyday dealings. Any Mormon who is deconstructing in any way is doing critical theory. That word, deconstructing, is a word that comes directly from critical theory, because you are deconstructing the social construction (Derrida). That is precisely the process of doing the work of critical theory: deconstruction. We are breaking down the assumptions of the world we were told were natural truths.

One of the power structures that critical theory started to deconstruct was the concept of race, as seen above. Another was gender.

Feminist theory intertwined with critical theory very early on. The social structure feminist theorists named, critiqued and wanted to dismantle was what they called patriarchy.

Now, since I spend way too much time trying to get into the heads of far-righters to figure out what the hell they could be thinking, I know that one of the criticisms about critical theory is that it is just that: a theory. I think they likely think of theory like they did in fourth grade doing their science fair projects trying to prove their child-version theories. They don’t ever seem to remember that capitalism is also a theory. That the New York Stock Exchange is working entirely off an economic theory. Honestly, the only reason this economic theory even works is because so many of us buy into it as a natural truth. Critical theory is just as sophisticated as any economic theory, including capitalism.

None of this, though, was something I knew when I stepped into a classroom at the University of Utah in 2013. I had come back to school to get a second degree in history because that film degree wasn’t working out as well as I had hoped, and I walked into HIST 4795: Mormonism and the American Experience taught by none other than Professor Paul Reeve.

Let’s Talk About Race and the Mormon Marxists

That name might sound familiar. Paul Reeve has since published two books, one of which is published by and sold in Deseret Book titled Let’s Talk About Race and the Priesthood. When I walked into his classroom in 2013, he was still working on his first book. That book would be published two years later, and I had the privilege of sitting in a class where he was uncovering his archival evidence and argument for it and working his thoughts out in real time with us, his students. That class and that book changed the trajectory of my life. I cannot overstate it. The book is titled Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.

Right here is where we are going to start tracing a split in the mythology of Mormon Feminism and see two distinct branches in Mormon feminisms as they develop through a really wild saga of events.

I knew when I entered the history program that I wanted to do Greek history, so I signed up for a class on classical Greek language. And in a bizarre twist of fate, that class was taught by Professor Margaret Toscano. Many of you reading this will be interested because you know who Margaret Toscano is and can maybe forecast some of this story, but for those of you who don’t, let’s catch you up.

This schism of Mormon feminisms, I would argue, develops more than thirty years ago, even before 1993, the year of the devastating, and I argue violent, excommunication of the September Six.

In the 1980s, Margaret Toscano was a fierce advocate for Mormon feminism. She was, and is, incredibly brave while she took on the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints openly fighting for feminist causes and pushing against Mormon patriarchy.

She wasn’t alone. There were at least six others, but truthfully more, who had been agitating for a major change in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These were scholars at BYU and activists, all members of the church, openly challenging the historicity of Mormonism, especially challenging the claims of the Restoration, the Book of Mormon’s origins, and the absence of Heavenly Mother, among other things. These scholars and activists were educated in critical theory, and were applying the methods to Mormonism. It is essential to understand that these efforts were coming to a head in the early 1990s when critical race theory and critical gender theory were also developing rapidly in academia across the country. These events in Utah were not happening in a vacuum. The scholars were responding to as much as they were shaping critical theory. They were doing important and incredible work alongside other important American critical theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw who was developing a concept of intersectionality and critical race theory and Judith Butler who was developing gender theory in those same early years of the ‘90s.

And it was clear that the work of these Mormon scholars was beginning to gather steam, because it started to get the attention from the hierarchal powers of the church. Keeping in mind that critical theory emphasizes not just thinking about the social structures of power, but actively challenging and dismantling those social structures. These scholars and activists bravely did just that. But the thing about challenging power structures is that those power structures have all the power to crush you if you don’t have enough support. And those with the power will not hesitate to crush challenges to their power to keep you from getting more support. This is forever the struggle of socialism. It should be easy to reimagine the church’s hierarchy as the bourgeoisie and the these critical theory scholars as the proletariat, or at least defenders of the proletariat.

Critical theory helps us deconstruct power structures, so we can more easily recognize that there isn’t anything we can call “the church.” When we talk about “the church” being solely the hierarchy and those that abide the hierarchy we dismiss the experiences of these proletariat Mormonisms trying to dismantle the current power structure and bid for a different structure.

However, there was not enough support to usurp the hierarchy of the church, and those in power (the Mormon hierarchy) took swift action to eliminate their political rivals — I think it is important that we realize that the hierarchy of the church absolutely was taking out their political, socialist rivals — and those scholars and activists were unceremoniously excommunicated in a calculated fashion. The hierarchy likely orchestrated their excommunications to take place in the same month (September) in order to truly demonstrate their power, leading many of the scholars to lose their jobs at BYU.

These are the September Six.

I have a lot of respect for those that put everything on the line, their livelihood and ability to remain in their community, for a pretty Marxist/socialist cause. It is important that we remember that legacy that we Mormon critical theorists stand on today as we try to continue to subvert the power structures of the church still, or again, however you see it.

But they actually weren’t six. They were seven.

In a final act of cruel ruthlessness, the hierarchy of the church excommunicated six of the seven instigators, leaving Margaret Toscano’s membership untouched, excommunicating her husband, Paul, essentially in her place. Cruelly ruthless because the leaders said that Margaret Toscano could not have executed such a feminist awakening within Mormonism if it weren’t for her husband allowing her to do so, thus he was excommunicated and she was not (Sara M. Patterson, The September Six: And the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism, 2023, 282-310).

But Paul Toscano was not merely a bystander to his wife’s critical theory and feminist journey. He was a graduate of BYU’s law school and prominent attorney in Salt Lake City. He gained attention from the church hierarchy for outlining an intellectual and convincing argument of the spiritual abuse that took place within Mormonism due to the unchecked power of the church hierarchy. He gave a talk at the Sunstone conference saying that a new Mormon Alliance should be formed which challenged this spiritual abuse. In his defense of academic freedom at BYU, he asked students to “see themselves as victims of what was happening” and warned them against “those who attempt to bring about goodness by compulsory means,” (Patterson, 293).

This political suppression, policing, and punishment of Mormon critical theorists by church authorities had consequences throughout Mormonism. It solidified the centralized power of the hierarchy. On BYU’s campus, this time is still referred to as “the troubles,” and is only spoken about in hushed tones and warnings. Recently, “the troubles” are being talked about more and more as new efforts to suppress BYU faculty emerge.

The chilling effect across BYU’s campus impacted faculty and students alike. One of those students being Paul Reeve. Reeve had finished his bachelor’s degree in 1992 and was in the middle his master’s degree at BYU when the September Six were excommunicated. The timing resulted in something really interesting: Reeve had to change his focus from Mormon Studies to History of the (so-called) American West. This shift in focus meant he had to read different sources and find different advisors to help shape his academic work than he otherwise would have. That meant that he was introduced to a wide range of historical context and a new lens of the history of the United States, with complex Indigenous histories, histories of race, and nationalism.

So while Mormonism was grappling with critical theory being applied to Mormon theology and difficult Mormon history, Reeve was examining these problems through a wider lens of (so-called) American history more broadly. He was reading and engaging with scholars who had very little to say or do with Mormonism. And ultimately, Reeve felt like he was caught somewhere both inside and outside of the Mormon history realm. Mormon history had always centered Mormonism. Always. But now Reeve was seeing Mormonism as a case study for broader problems with American settler colonialism. In a way, the inability to focus on Mormon history at BYU at that specific time helped Reeve better fit Mormonism in its larger American historical context.

This is important to my story, because, like a child, I was absorbing all the initial introductions to history I could in order to learn how to do historical work, and Reeve’s class taught me before anyone else could that Mormon history should be fit into the larger historical context. Mormon history isn’t happening on its own in a vacuum. There are outside cultural forces always influencing it. And now I can’t see Mormonism any other way.

What is important about this moment is that Reeve had to turn his attention to the wider American history, and when he did so, he was forced to engage with theories about race that were not centered on Mormonism’s specific racial problem.

Reeve’s work was deeply impacted by the September Six, but simply because he was not able to engage with Mormon history like anyone before him could. He was forced to think about it differently. And thinking about something differently, even if forced, can lead to real intellectual breakthroughs, which I believe Religion of a Different Color is.

The primary argument of Religion of a Different Color is not that Mormons were considered a different race than white, though many people understand that to be the central argument when they finish it. They do so because they don’t realize Reeve is doing something different. He isn’t centering Mormonism like his predecessors did.

The argument of the book is bigger and more important than this one idea. It is true that white citizens of the United States began to develop theories that Mormons were a different race. They were constructing a Mormon race, yes. And Reeve provides substantial evidence for this. He gives evidence of doctors who said that biologically, Mormons were becoming something different, and you could tell through their changing physical characteristics, including becoming sterile. But Reeve isn’t arguing that Mormons were a different race and therefore discriminated against. This is the victim mentality that many Mormons adopt.

No. What Reeve is arguing is that Mormonism as a racial category is an example of how easily race was constructed through pseudoscientific methods in 19th-century America. And he follows that by arguing that the construction of race is always for political power to always remain in the hands of white supremacy in the United States. He says that race is not a biological reality, but a social construction, and we can use Mormons as a really good example, or case study, for that. This is an argument about the American context Mormonism exists in, not that Mormonism itself is the focus.

Race is not a biological reality; it is socially constructed. This is crucial for us to understand and remember as we move forward to think about Mormon feminism.

Reeve says that Mormons are forever eager to participate in and validate white supremacy by trying to gain whiteness. And, he says, the best way to achieve whiteness is to distance yourself from Blackness. Mormons were therefore actively participating in white supremacy, trying to achieve whiteness, by purposefully distancing themselves from Blackness. Not only are Mormons participating in white supremacy through this, they are participating in race construction. Race is constructed to limit political influence and power of some people, and, in the case of Mormons, to vie for political power by achieving whiteness.

This is a brilliant and critical argument.

It is also Reeve using critical race theory to talk about racial social structures in the United States. Even if Professor Reeve never told me this was critical race theory, I understand now how critical race theory entirely shaped his argument.

After you read it, and understand the argument, you are left with the choice: as a Mormon, will you participate in the forever upholding of Mormon whiteness, or will you step off the conveyer belt and start challenging and dismantling race constructions altogether?

From the second I left that class over a decade ago, I have been actively trying to do the second one, even when I fail at it.

Silencing the Historians

I think Reeve would agree that that book could only have happened through the work and publications — and risks — of the September Six and others who took those risks. The book also could only have happened by leaving the prescribed path of Mormon history as a discipline. The September Six and those within Mormonism, even the ones challenging Mormon hierarchy, could not have developed Reeve’s reading list enough that he could have written that book. He needed those who were engaged in the theory and American history but weren’t engaged in Mormonism. He needed the broader work of people of color doing critical race theory, people directly impacted by the social construction of race and who had their access limited to political power.

More than that, though, Reeve’s book relies on the work of other historians who are not celebrated at the same level as the September Six. Primarily, Reeve relied on the work of scholars of color outlining critical race theory, but also on Mormon historians of color who had long been advocating for racial justice within Mormonism, people like Darius Gray. Gray’s scholar-activist work first and foremost agitated successfully for the change in the priesthood and temple ban in 1978. Gray also outlined the history of race within Mormonism while he simultaneously helped to found the Genesis Group in 1971, before the priesthood and temple bans ended, a group focusing on the needs of Black Latter-day Saints, which still functions today.

Gray, though, was not part of this elite group of Mormon scholars with PhDs, the September Six. He was conducting historical work to correct Mormon history, especially concerning Mormons of color, before the September Six came on the scene. Reeve has a scholarship lineage, then, that semi-bypassed the September Six and follows directly from the scholarship of Black Mormons.

This is why I claim there is an important disruption of Mormon feminisms during the September Six troubles. All those scholars engaging in Mormonism dealt with Mormonism through Mormonism lenses, talking through it with other Mormonism scholars with PhDs.

What we can say is that the work of those scholars who put everything on the line during the ‘80s and ‘90s and were excommunicated opened up a world of Mormonisms which saw Mormon scholarship enter into broader academia.

The story of what happened after September 1993 for Margaret Toscano is a frustrating one. While Reeve was opening up Mormon history to the broader American racialized context, and following the legacy of Mormon historians of color, Margaret Toscano was caught in a difficult position. Because she hadn’t been excommunicated, she ended up losing her place within feminist activist circles, and because her husband had been excommunicated, she lost her place within Mormon circles (Patterson, 282-284).

However, Toscano and the September Six, because they worked in an insular Mormon framework, were never really challenged in a substantial enough way by critical race theorists, critical gender theorists, or critical queer theorists outside Mormonism. These theorists could likely not engage with Mormonism out of both a lack of desire and a lack of ability, which left the September Six without enough critique from critical theorists.

It is for this reason that Mormon Feminism has gotten away with never having had to engage with or confront biological essentialism until 2015 when Reeve’s book was published, and even still, only a small handful of Mormon scholars do engage with it.

So before we can unpack what biological essentialism is, we need to think about the way we have told Mormon history and done Mormon feminism up until 2015.

D. Michael Quinn, one of the September Six, was a renowned and accomplished historian who pushed the boundaries of Mormon history and challenged the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ stranglehold on the ability to tell Mormon history. The hierarchy of the church insisted on their ability to tell the history of the church through their mythmaking procedures which relied very little of primary source evidence. Quinn, along with others, applied historical methodology to the study of Mormon history, utilizing a vast amount of primary sources (for background on this, Quinn gave a speech at BYU in 1981 titled “On Being a Mormon Historian” which some might find helpful to read here).

However, we can see a bias when people claim D. Michael Quinn essentially founded the field of Mormon Studies without ever referencing to the work Gray had done a decade earlier for Black Mormon history.

But the methodology of Mormon history and Mormon Feminism, and for that matter the history of Mormons of color by Gray, centered on the retelling of history through primary sources that had been banished and forgotten. They were simply telling the history of Mormon women, Mormons of color, and other Mormons that had been forgotten, not engaging with theories about systems and power when it came to race, gender, or sexuality. This was not as much of a problem in the broader Mormon history genre more generally, but it has left a large and gapping hole in Mormon Feminism.

Mormon Feminists like Margaret Toscano and others applied the methodology of this new Mormon history to tell the story of Mormon women. It was necessary and essential work, because it uncovered a long legacy of Mormon women participating in the structure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in many ways that had been forgotten. Thus, Mormon Feminism transformed almost entirely into a history of Mormon women. But Mormon feminist history is more than simply a history of Mormon women; it is a history of gender construction, like that of race construction, and patriarchy.

I would argue that this happened because that work was necessary and there were not enough Mormon feminists who could actually carry out the work of Mormon Feminism, especially given that those that did risked their entire Mormon lives to do so, as evidenced by the excommunication of the September Six. So this is not a critique of the September Six, but a critique of the hierarchy to bar and scare women from the workforce and then eliminate those in the scholarly workforce from the body of the church. There simply were not enough people doing Mormon feminism to produce a formal and essential Third Wave Mormon Feminism. This work needed to be done by an entire institution, and fell like an anvil on just seven people. If we think for a second about the amount of historians the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now employs to do the work of church history to work on church primary source documents, an entire department of the church, we recognize how huge of a task this is and how it could never have been thoroughly conducted by just seven people. Yet these seven people provided so much for us to work with and pushed the institution to develop that history department. So it makes sense that these seven people had to decide whether to engage with the history of Mormon women or engage with feminist and gender critical theory. They chose the former.

Let’s Talk About Gender

These feminists made a choice. They decided to turn toward historical methods and did not significantly engage with critical theory in ways beyond challenging the structure of the institution of the church, which is part of critical theory called poststructuralism. They focused on dismantling the hierarchy’s power grab by saying that there were many Mormonisms and those Mormonisms had power beyond what the hierarchy of the church granted them. These are powerful critical theory arguments that I think are still very relevant today. They do not, though, center feminist critical theory or critical gender theory.

In fact, no one would do so until 2012 when a professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at Kalamazoo College, Taylor Petrey, published “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology,” and really not again until 2021, nearly thirty years after the September Six were excommunicated, when Petrey published his book Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism.

This shows the power of hierarchy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to successfully and systematically eliminate their political rivals and stall the work of critical theory that challenged their power.

So let’s return to two cliffhangers: Reeve’s work on Mormonism and critical race theory and the role of biological essentialism.

Within the larger American academic movement toward critical theory in humanistic disciplines, critical theorists recognize that, yes, we want to take on the power structure of patriarchy, but more importantly, they recognize that the patriarchy we exist within is built out of white supremacy. Critical theorists almost across the board place the most urgency on deconstructing white supremacy over all other systems of oppression because all the rest fall under the umbrella of white supremacy. Unsurprisingly, this understanding is reaching Mormonism several decades after academics of critical gender theory have largely already come to this consensus.

Critical gender theory — which is one feminism, but the one I find most compelling and most convincing — relies on the work of critical race theorists who delved into biological essentialism, sometimes called biological determinism.

If we remember Reeve’s argument from his book Religion of a Different Color, he shows — successfully, in my opinion — that race is not a biological reality, but a socially constructed legal concept. We can’t actually determine race based on a set of biological qualities, meaning we cannot prove biological determinism. Nor can we boil all the qualities of a certain race down to their essential characteristics, which is what biological essentialism does. When we analyze the physical and biological categories of a “race,” we find exceptions all the time to the categories, so those categories cannot be natural or inherently biological (you can read the Encyclopedia Britannica page here). While the political and legal limitations of race have real-world consequences, they are not based in biological reality.

In the early 1990s, gender theorist Judith Butler (they/them) applied the critical race theory critique of biological essentialism to critical gender theory, saying that we cannot reduce gender or “biological” sex to stable categories that are consistent across all bodies and across time and space (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990; Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 1993). Butler was not the first to critique gender essentialism within the feminist movement, but they did initiate the application of the critical race theory approach of critiquing biological essentialism to critical gender theory (you can watch an introduction to Butler’s gender theory at this YouTube video here and in this interview with the Guardian here the long feminist trajectory they build off of in their works).

Here is just a sampling of what Butler theorized when they were developing their thoughts for their book, Gender Trouble:

“It was meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism, but it turned out to be more about gender categories. For instance, what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated,” (Jules Gleeson, “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman,’ The Guardian, September 7, 2021).

What Butler is saying is that the category of ‘woman’ is not a stable category. No biological characteristics are shared across all those that are ‘women.’ To reduce or essentialize ‘woman’ as a category is to practice in gender and biological essentialism and to participate in the worldview of white supremacy.

Nowhere in “official scholarship” of Mormon Feminism was such a radical idea of gender found until 2021. Not only did critical gender and race theory not enter the consciousness of Mormon Feminist thought, neither did critical queer theory as it emerged with Butler. All three (gender, race, queer) critical theories intertwine and work to FIRST dismantle white supremacy and the biological essentialism that white supremacy created. That notion is missing almost entirely from Mormon Feminism which centers solely on patriarchy rather than white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy.

Unfortunately, because these discourses on gender and race theory were happening at the same time as the (violent) expulsion of the September Six, those theories never really entered Mormon Feminism throughout the entire course of the 1990s and early 2000s. In many ways, gender and race theory are still not part of mainstream Mormon Feminism.

Petrey, in Tabernacles of Clay in 2021, comes out as a Butlerian in his introduction, and gives the first real Mormon critique of cisheteropatriarchy. He gives an excellent overview of Butler’s theory and how we can apply it to Mormon history of gender. Petrey provides a very clear argument for his book after he introduces Butler’s theories:

“This book challenges the view that modern Mormon leaders have consistently taught gender essentialism as the sole or even primary theory of sexual difference. Appeals to essentialism cover over the fear of sexual and gender fluidity. … There is overlap — one that must be explained and contextualized — between Butler’s performative theory and modern Mormon approaches to gender and sexuality,” (Petrey, 14).

Then Petrey immediately dives into the relationship between Butlerian gender theory and critical race theory:

“Both modern discourses of race and sexuality coincided with new social and legal forces to clearly categorize people and to emphasize differences in hierarchy,” (Petrey, 15).

Mormon theology and doctrine, Petrey demonstrates, relies on gender fluidity throughout the 20th century, and therefore gender cannot be stabilized or essentialized.

Critical gender and queer theory tap into the critique offered by critical race theory that says that biological categories, not just gender categories are unstable. We cannot rely on any single biological category to be present in all people who were Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB), let alone all women. Whether we are considering external reproductive organs, internal reproductive organs, chromosomes, hormones or any other physical characteristic, we cannot establish one that is present in all AFAB people or women. Therefore, biological essentialism is fundamentally wrong and only used to political and legally exclude women, femmes, and AFAB people.

But somehow, queer, gender, and race theory have not entered into the larger Mormon Feminist discourse, despite the fact that Petrey has written such a clear and excellent argument for why we should apply all to Mormon feminisms.

Is Heavenly Mother a TERF?

I was intrigued when I first learned that Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, under the helm of Petrey as editor, would release an entire issue in 2022 dedicated to Heavenly Mother. I anticipated that there would be critical engagement with queer, gender, and race theory as it applies to the concept of Heavenly Mother.

Instead I was shocked when I read the issue.

While Blaire Ostler, author of the book Queer Mormon Theology: An Introduction, provided a bold and sophisticated critique of Heavenly Mother using critical queer theory and heavy critique of gender essentialism, none of the other works had any foundation in critical race, gender, or queer theory (you can read Blaire’s article here).

The work I found most egregious came from none other than Margaret Toscano.

The article is titled “In Defense of Heavenly Mother: Her Critical Importance for Mormon Culture and Theology,” and you can read it here. The opening lines of the work set the tone, with a tried and true argument used almost exclusively by Tran Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), saying that trans people “attack” women’s bodies and leave men’s bodies alone, so right off the bat, I was suspicious. Then in the next paragraph, M. Toscano pointedly came after Petrey’s criticism of Heavenly Mother as heteronormative, saying directly that Petrey unfairly criticized her herself (Petrey, “Rethinking Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother,” 2016). She says that “Petery’s concern has become the center of LGBTQ gender critique in current LDS theological discussions where the Mother God, rather than her male counterpart, is seen as the culpable party,” (Toscano, 38). At that point, I ventured from shock to horror as I realized that Toscano was openly using TERF language, but also did not even know (or refused?) to use the language of “queer theory,” instead opting for “LGBTQ gender critique.” I don’t know what she meant by this, but it feels safe to assume, since she was using coded TERF language elsewhere, that this was meant to also be trans exclusionary.

Now, I’m not here to necessarily critique M. Toscano’s theological framework. Instead, I critique her lack of critical race, gender, or queer theory. But I will comment on this particular argument M. Toscano makes, because I don’t think it should go unchallenged: The idea that queer theorists aren’t pushing back on Heavenly Father’s body and presence is not the point. The point is that when we introduce a Heavenly Mother, Her existence is actually working to solidify or stabilize BOTH Heavenly Father’s and Heavenly Mother’s genders and bodies. The dedication to Heavenly Mother is doing the work of ensuring Heavenly Father’s body is not queer in either gender or sexuality. But that is the last I will say concerning her (in my opinion weak and problematic) specific arguments, and focus more on the ways in which she flat out rejects critical race, gender, and queer theory.

She introduces a bizarre idea that queer people should embrace Heavenly Mother because “an embodied, gendered female deity can be an indispensable figure and source of hope, comfort, and liberation for all the oppressed,” (M. Toscano, 42), which if she had encountered any critical race theory, she would see immediately as a white saviorism argument, which can be easily rejected, and should also be seen as benevolent sexism, and rejected by Mormon feminists anyway. But, unfortunately, I have more than once seen Mormon feminists use the very benevolent sexism they hate to experience on their queer peers.

Finally, M. Toscano slips into blatant biological and gender essentialism without any recourse or inhibition when she says that “the fact that, biologically, woman is needed to create an embryo is crucial,” in two paragraphs worth of biological essentialist and queerphobic nonsense.

But what is uniquely odd about this article, is that it uses TERF language in what M. Toscano says is in support of trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. Trans exclusionary radical feminists generally are explicit in their transphobia where M. Toscano seems to show that she is just out of communication with both gender theorists and trans exclusionary radical feminists alike.

Other Scholarship and Activism

I have now traced a very specific line of Mormon Feminism through the September Six and Mormon historians, and while many in Mormonism find the historians to be some of the most progressive and radical, I find Mormon historians to be much more conservative than other disciplines that intersect with Mormon feminisms. Namely, we could write an equally-long history of the distinct Mormon feminisms of those with a Psy.D, people who have doctorates in psychology. Those Mormon feminisms are much more fractured and fragmented than the ones in history; they are also doing much more radical work of critical race, gender, and queer theory.

Those doing this explicitly intersectional work now are people like Dr. Kimberly Applegate, Tekulvē Jackson-Vann, Dr. Lacey Bagley, Andrés Larios Brown, Dr. Lisa Diamond and Colette Dalton, all of whom I have worked with, admire, and hope to continue future collaborations among. This is a very condensed list of those I have worked with. There are MANY others.

Among historian feminist scholar-activists, though, I think there is one that stands out as a bridge between the September Six and Paul Reeve/Taylor Petrey. Lindsay Hansen Park has really turned Mormon feminist scholarship and activism AND Mormon history on its head. Coming onto the scene in 2010, LHP challenges the elitism within academia by producing high-quality history (and, I think, cultural anthropology) from her start as a Mormon feminist blogger. She began by writing for Feminist Mormon Housewives in 2010 and immediately took a critical theory approach, but centered postcolonial critical theory, something I would say encompasses critical race, gender, and queer theory all at once.

I admire the work of Hansen Park for a lot of reasons, but most fundamentally because of her work with our FLDS siblings to better understand and empathize with our polygamous past and present.

Hansen Park is now the executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation, which centers and develops Mormon scholarship through its magazine and international conferences. Through these positions, Hansen Park has interviewed many of the people in this piece, including excellent interviews with Paul Reeve (one of which you can find here) and with Taylor Petrey (which you can find here).

Conclusion

I come to this piece with a lot of privilege. As a white nonbinary lesbian, I have a different life-long educational experience than my friends of color. Not only were my white-supermajority schools provided more resources than those elsewhere across the State of Utah, but as a white student, my majority white teachers approached me with different expectations. Additionally, my mother graduated from university after having three kids with another on the way and eventually went on to get a PhD along with my father. I was therefore able to work my way through the university experience guided by those who had previous exposure. I also, to my great relief, avoided marrying a man and/or having children early and young as is expected from Latter-day Saint AFAB people. Because of these things, I have biases and blind spots that can and should be pressed and examined.

What I hope for Mormon feminisms moving forward, is to actively fight white supremacy first and foremost, because under white supremacy’s umbrella is white supremacist constructed patriarchy, which Mormonism suffers from, and queerphobia. We can no longer afford to think of patriarchy and white supremacy as separate oppressions, but instead, we must see that our version of patriarchy is directly tied to gender and biological essentialism developed from white supremacy.

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Then I first came out to myself and publicly as nonbinary, I asked my friends who had been in queer and gender studies spaces much longer than I had if it was possible to be both nonbinary and lesbian, since these seemed like contradictory identities, even though both felt like they described by experience. At the time, I Googled it to find others who identified this way, but I found no articles, no help. Now if you Google “nonbinary lesbian” there are plenty of articles describing this experience.

I felt like a liar, not trans enough, not lesbian enough, a common experience of nonbinary lesbians and trans people. The decision to label myself this way was both affirming and distressing.

I didn’t want to be wrong.

But it was my reality. It was me finally trusting that I knew myself and knew my gender and sexuality and not relying on some other verification which helped me ease into these identities. I am nonbinary and I am a lesbian. Those things are just true. For me.

I had to do the difficult work of sitting in the distress and discomfort of those contradicting identities until I could approach them with enough curiosity that I could understand what it meant for me.

Growing up in Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had given up so much of my identity and power to a church that required not just conformity, but also bending to one Mormon universal Truth. In this way, Mormonism has created its own positivism, meaning that Mormon Truth can be derived from a shared understanding of what we as Mormons know to be true, a phrase we use regularly. This Mormon positivism shaped my whole worldview, and I still find it hard to fight sometimes.

It didn’t help that my dad was a Mormon philosopher who taught me truth tables early on in my life, where one can make a table of logic sentences and mark them with a “t” for “true” or an “f” for “false” to ultimately find what was mathematically true and mathematically false. These tables serve a tangible function. They are used to make binary computer code where the “t”s and “f”s are swapped with “0”s and “1”s which makes it so I can type this out right now and send it to everyone reading it. Sometimes binaries are essential. But I would suggest those instances are rare.

In Mormon communities, when we have to make choices, we lean into this line of thinking and expect there to be a good answer and a wrong answer. We expect there to be good people and bad people. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking. As a nonbinary person, I prefer the term binary thinking.

So as I was coming out, I understood my gender to be a non-woman woman at the same time as a non-man man. This isn’t how all nonbinary people understand their gender, but it is how I understand mine. And at the same time, I understood my sexuality as leaning into the non-woman woman part who loves women. The reason I leaned more into the non-woman woman part was that I am AFAB, a person Assigned Female at Birth, and that is how the world interpreted me, even though it isn’t my experience, my gender, or even how I relate to my so-called biological sex (we’ll table that conversation for another day).

It is destabilizing when you exist in a world where your gender and sex simply don’t exist. There is no gender marker for us, only “X,” meaning… I’m opting out, I guess. There is no gender for us other than what we are not. This is why I insist on nonbinary instead of non-binary, because it emphasizes that I have a gender. I don’t just exist as “not” something only.

But contradictions and paradoxes have always been my jam. Catch-22 has been my favorite book since I was 16, a book which invented an - ultimately absurd - insanity paradox. A book literally tattooed into me.

In 2016, I completed a Master’s thesis in which I entered into a fraught and politically charged binary academic debate. In 2009, the debate was so intense, a letter was sent to President Obama by ancient Macedonian scholars who insisted that the international political community expose the ahistorical claims of the Balkan state of Macedonia and its denial of “geographical and historical fact.” The signatories asked President Obama to recognize the borders of Greece and Macedonia to be those along the ancient borders, which included ancient Macedonia — the homeland of Alexander the Great — as a part of Greece and part of Greek heritage, not separate from Greekness, and to force the Republic of Macedonia to change its name. The debate was so intense, academics, including my advisor, lost their positions at conferences and in edited volumes. Many of those that did not sign the letter could not participate in ancient Macedonian studies any longer.

In a wild series of events, this debate ultimately resulted in the Republic of Macedonia changing its name to North Macedonia to appease — in my opinion — a western temper tantrum.

In my thesis, I looked at all the ancient evidence to decide whether, in fact, the ancient Macedonians were Greek or not Greek. And having looked at all the evidence, I concluded in my thesis something no other scholar who ventured into this question before me had: that the ancient Macedonians were Greek… and not Greek. At the same time.

Honestly, the evidence and this conclusion blew my mind. It challenged every positivist conclusion I thought I knew. How could a people be something and not that thing at the same time? I feel very lucky I stepped into that debate, even though it was fraught, because it gave me something to fall back on when I came out as a non-woman woman and a non-man man nonbinary person. The evidence and data supporting identity contradictions was just so overwhelming. I could rely on a structured argument using vast evidence to support an identity contradiction, so whose to say I couldn’t apply it to other identities, like my own?

Identities aren’t stable; they are fluid. And it is western colonial universal positivism that insists on the binary “truth table” of identity. I wholeheartedly reject that anxious — and ultimately violent — western desire to make unstable categories stable.

So far this essay has exposed me as a disciple of the philosophical school of skepticism — skeptics hold a doubtful attitude toward commonly accepted knowledge claims. I’m happy to embrace that title. So it should be no wonder that when I sit in fast and testimony meetings, the claims of Latter-day Saints to know that the church is true hits my curiosity bone, and I wonder what it means to know something when we are explicitly told to have faith in it. It means that Latter-day Saints deploy this positivist approach to their religion. It also means that all those who engage with Mormonism either know it to be true or false. And this is where I take issue with the use of “cognitive dissonance” among Latter-day Saints and Mormonish people.

Mormonish people have a tendency to misuse the term “cognitive dissonance.” So let’s explore what cognitive dissonance theory is. The theory says that when we participate in actions that contradict our values, it can and often does result in psychological distress. Mormons have a unique way of interpreting the theory to say that because they experienced this psychological distress, they need to ease that distress, often meaning that they remove themselves from the contradiction. You’ll hear people say that because the cognitive dissonance was so great, I had to “leave” the church. What is interesting, though, is that you cannot leave cognitive dissonance, unless you want to further ensnare yourself in it. You can only manage or ease it. That is the distressing thing about contradictions and paradoxes, you really cannot escape them.

But by now I’ve become really comfortable sitting in contradictions, getting curious about contradictions rather than trying to “solve” them.

People ask me all the time if I am “active” or not, how much I participate in Mormon service, if I have a temple recommend or not. All of these are scripted questions designed by a church to determine who is in and who is not. But I don’t play by these arbitrary and unstable church rules. I am Mormon and not Mormon at the same time. And I have no problem with that contradiction. I don’t have to leave anything, because, quite frankly, I don’t believe there is a stable enough concept of the Mormon church to leave in the first place. I think that that assumed stability is a mirage that church leaders have propagated to hide the fact that Mormonism is not a stable concept. In fact, I think this is why President Nelson insists on using “Latter-day Saints” rather than “Mormon,” because Mormon is a much too unstable concept to continue to wield power over, so it is exchanged for the more stable “Latter-day Saint.”

I’m not really invested in the question about whether this church is true or false. I think that is a false binary, and honestly, boring. I’m more interested in the question: what the hell even is Mormonism? And what ways can we disrupt the seemingly inherent power structure and hierarchy? That second question is a much more fun one than even the first. I don’t care about the true or false nature of Mormonism, or what it is; I care about the internal contradictions that undermine our view of it as a stable, unified concept. If your point is to bring down the Mormon hierarchy — and I wish people were more honest about their desires to do so, rather than constantly arguing in bad faith — then stop playing by the church’s positivist rules and throw those out the window. There truly is no “the church” to leave. There is only a power structure to undermine and play with.

Let’s pause here, and let that sentiment settle while we return to think about identities. As I said, I am comfortable with saying I am Mormon and not Mormon, just as I’m comfortable saying I’m a non-woman woman and a non-man man. I think there are many people who also feel comfortable saying they are Mormon and not Mormon at the same time, so why are we comfortable understanding our identity this way, but at the same time use “cognitive dissonance” as our reason to leave?

The uncomfortable reality is that we cannot escape cognitive dissonance, and the more we try to do the mental gymnastics to say we have escaped — or left — it, the further we fall deeper into the trap that is cognitive dissonance. That is the beauty of a paradox. We can either sit in the contradiction or deny it altogether, but to deny it is to succumb to cognitive dissonance.

Let’s explore an example. I am racist. I was born into a racist religion within a racist imperialist nation. Unfortunately, I cannot undo all the parts of me and my life that are shaped by the racism in my thoughts, actions, and blood. At the same time, I (try to) practice anti-racism. I don’t know anyone who is actively engaged in this practice who says they are anti-racist; we are always working towards an unattainable anti-racist self. The second I deny that I am racist or begin to claim that I am anti-racist, I enter into a space of cognitive dissonance, because so much of my life is shaped by racism, even when I desperately don’t want it to be. Cognitive dissonance = my value is anti-racism, but my existence relies on racism. There is no leaving racism. I can sit in that space of cognitive dissonance, face it, acknowledge it, and accept it while still fighting racism, or I can deny it exists inside myself. But denying it doesn’t make it go away; it only pulls me deeper into the cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance has the ability to fracture our sense of self, but the more insidious version of cognitive dissonance aids us in denying that our internal contradictions exist. We rely on cognitive dissonance in this way because it is psychologically distressing to learn we are fractured selves, not unified selves, and cognitive dissonance helps us ease that distress.

What I see happen in Mormon discourses, though, is the unsophisticated use of cognitive dissonance to say that we can escape it; we can leave. But anyone who suggests or argues that is so deeply embedded in their own cognitive dissonance that they can’t come to terms with the fact that cognitive dissonance is inescapable, only manageable.

There are many ways to ease this cognitive dissonance, but not get rid of it. I will share the way I ease my cognitive dissonance, but I’ll warn you now: you’re not gonna like it.

While I am a disciple of skepticism, I’m also a disciple of another philosophical school: Mormon Christianity. The reason I subscribe to this philosophical tradition is not only because I cannot escape it, but because it offers a helpful worldview for dealing with cognitive dissonance. I call it a philosophy not a religion because I’m not trying to convert anyone to a Truth, but instead to consider a philosophical model to healing cognitive dissonance.

The philosophical concepts of Grace and the Atonement are so disappointingly misused among most Latter-day Saints. We have been taught through church publications and materials and Sunday school classes that to practice the Atonement is to kneel down every night and recount all the wrongs we have done throughout the day and ask God for their forgiveness.

What a rudimentary, unsophisticated, and dangerous interpretation of such a powerful philosophy!

Grace as a concept is meant to make up for the ways I cannot be perfect. This doesn’t mean that I make mistakes every day. It means that I am in a constant state of cognitive dissonance where it is impossible for me to live by my values. Take for instance my racism. I cannot escape racism. I participate in racism every moment of every day in some way. What I can do is practice anti-racism and ask for God, Christ, and the Atonement to make up for the impossible inescapability. I can practice the Atonement in conjunction with practicing anti-racism. Likewise, I will make mistakes in my anti-racist practice. I will have to ask for and seek forgiveness, repentance, and hold myself accountable. In holding myself accountable, the concept of Grace embraces me to tell me I am worthy of life and love even when I fail in the impossible task of ridding myself of racism.

I don’t have to operate under the unstable and therefore unpredictable power structures of Mormon hierarchy to access Grace or this philosophy. In fact, my belief in that last sentence demonstrates how unstable those power structures are and why those in hierarchal positions cling to their power to determine what is Mormon and what is not; it is why they cling to their power to to decide who is Mormon and who is not. I’m not going to give into that self-declared power. I’m going to make my own Mormon power.

And that is why I’m Mormon and not Mormon at the same time. What a powerful, structurally destabilizing realization.

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