Item Detail
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33057
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0
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4
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English
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Reflections on the New Latter-day Saint Temple in Bengaluru and Religious Gender Norms
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Essentialism and Fluidity in Mormon Constructions of Gender
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Mormon Studies Review
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2022
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9
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41-51
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"There was recent publicity in Utah press about the new Mormon temple that will be built in Bengaluru, India (known as Bangalore until 2014), the first temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the country. There was a groundbreaking ceremony in December 2020, yet a survey of leading English-language newspapers in India reveals that this event was not widely reported. It was certainly not as widely reported as the groundbreaking of another temple in August 2020: the Ram Mandir, or the Ram Temple, which has been a violently contentious issue in India for the last three decades or so. Demolition of an ancient mosque in 1992 to build a temple, fiery deaths of dozens of Hindu pilgrims and kar sevaks in Godhra, and the subsequent anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002-- thousands of casualties in these violent conflicts-- raise traumatic private and public memories associated with building of temples in India. In this essay I reflect on the similarities between the two religious movements that are building these two temples, and how-- despite their very different statuses in India-- their ideas about gender overlap in important ways. I will draw from personal as well as research experiences with these two belief systems to demonstrate similarities in gender hierarchy and related marginalization in and across two continents." [Author]