Item Detail
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33144
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1
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6
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English
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Queer Mormons
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Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender
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London
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Routledge
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525-538
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"Understood in the context of queer theory’s driving to disrupt and upend assumptions about the naturalness, inevitability, and desirability of heterosexual culture, the phrase 'queer Mormons' goes beyond queer’s current colloquial meaning as an umbrella-like identificatory descriptor for non-normative sexual and gender identities to suggest that it is both desirable and necessary to challenge the assumptions, knowledges, practices, and institutions of heterosexual culture that dominate Mormonism; or to use 'queer' as queer theorists do—as a verb rather than a noun—the phrase suggests that it is both desirable and necessary to queer Mormonism. This chapter then, while not denying the more common or less critical ways in which the term queer is used, explicitly employs it as a simultaneously theoretical and practical term that calls 'into question conventional understandings of sexual identity by deconstructing the categories, the oppositions and equations that sustain them,' primarily the two-sex system, the gender binary, and a fixed notion of sexual identity, as well as the apparently clear and stable relationship between all three (Jagose, 1997, p. 97). Thus, queering Mormonism is a task that challenges many of the fundamental ideas at the foundation of modern Mormon life, but it is also one that proposes alternative ways for historicizing, thinking, and living Mormonism. This is an especially important task given that the religious institution that often comes to stand in for the entirety of the Mormon faith tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, currently promotes heterosexuality as the organizing feature of all life, whether it be social, cultural, political, or spiritual life, not only in this world, but as the condition that made this world possible and that will characterize the next." [Author]
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Exceptionally Queer : Mormon Peculiarity and US Exceptionalism
Lavender Sons of Zion : A History of Gay Men in Salt Lake City, 1950--1979
Mormonism and Same-Sex Marriage : Theological Underpinnings and New Perspectives
Multiply and Replenish : Mormon Essays on Sex and Family
Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-century Americans : A Mormon Example
Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology