Taylor G. Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism offers a novel analysis of sexual difference, gender, and marriage in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) teachings in the United States. His award-winning study provides profound insights and perspectives—historiographical ones, since “the Mormon confrontation and confluence with modernity and globalization after World War II” (5), as well as theoretical ones. It assesses various sources on the debates and practices in Mormonism and is inspired by queer theory as a method. From the beginning, Petrey intends to show overlaps between queer theories of sexual subjectivity and conservative Mormon responses to homosexuality. The concept of gender and sexual fluidity explains non-binary sexual choice and identity, but also helps to imagine the possibility of flowing back into heterosexuality according to a concept of sexual malleability. Gender performativity is thus not about essentialism but “a temporally bounded, tenuous gesture toward an approximation of an ideal” (14).
One might call Petrey’s hypothesis a queering of modern Mormon history of gender and sexuality. It entails an exploration of ambivalences in the conservative teachings of church leaders responding to the social changes that led to the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay, lesbian, and trans rights movements. According to Petrey, “in modern Mormonism, gender is a fluid concept that must be secured and produced with strong ecclesiastical, legal, and cultural norms” (15). Moreover, he notes that, following LDS teaching, “[f]ailure to perform as either male or female in the proper way risked satanic captivity” (90).
Petrey’s study relates to different research areas and gaps: First, the book, based on earlier studies, deconstructs an essentialist understanding of gender and sexuality in Mormon views; second, it builds on sociological approaches to gender; and third, it analyzes asymmetrical power dynamics about agency within Mormonism, which clearly plays an ambiguous part in women’s history and gay and lesbian history. By elaborating on the awareness of a fragile heterosexuality in the conservative ideals of gender, sexuality, and family life in church instructions, Petrey drives forward evaluations of Mormonism as either assimilating or rejecting US culture.
Petrey assumes differences of genders, sexes, and races to be historical and ideological. Those identity categories are not fixed or given by nature but are instead “the object of historical and theoretical inquiry” (10). In conjunction with Petrey’s non-essentialist understanding of gender, the study presents a contextualization and historicization of the relevant debates. The author’s detailed discussion does not reproduce the statements of the male church leaders; rather, he interprets them as multidimensional parts in a specific social context and gives voice to non-binary oriented Mormons as well (see BYU undergraduate student Cloy Jenkins’ 1977 manifesto Prologue: An Examination of the Mormon Attitude toward Homosexuality, cited on page 85). In each chapter Petrey analyzes LDS teachings on gender and sexuality—offered in response to social changes during a concrete time period—so that the reader can follow a genealogy of beliefs about gender and how it is treated by the varied power dynamics within Mormonism. (In a 2018 style guide published by the church, the term “Mormon” was deemed no longer appropriate, but the author uses it because it was accepted as self-designation in the period considered.)
The first and the second chapters are dedicated to the post-war years up to 1970. In general, church leaders supported a strict understanding of patriarchal marriage, advocating gender-specific labor and opposing interracial marriage (the latter being a controversial issue in the US at the time). Here, the church’s intentions were similar to those of other conservative religious groups. During that period the Mormon church made use of psychological theories about gender acquisition and contingency, professionalizing their therapeutics for homosexuality in the context of the 1970’s ex-gay movements. The political dimensions of these practices are discussed in chapter 3. Against the Equal Rights Amendment and in favor of anti-sodomy laws, LDS’ interests aligned with those of the Religious Right between 1970 and 1982. With regard to to the church’s understanding, homosexuality and feminism threatened the political stability of the nation and society. Nevertheless, Mormonism accommodated a type of “soft egalitarianism,” which stood in tension with the patriarchal teachings of the church. In the 1990s, the model of a Mormon marriage changed (chapter 4); the patriarchal and racially segregated understanding of a Mormon family was replaced by a heterosexual understanding, as laid out in the 1995 document, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” Women’s paid labor was no longer a problem, but church leaders continued to excommunicate transgender persons. In 2015, the year when the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, the church defined this type of marriage as “‘apostasy’ and grounds for immediate excommunication from the church” (171).
The last chapter focuses on the dynamics of LDS conceptions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in the 21st century. For instance, the church postponed an ostensible cure for gay and lesbian identities to the afterlife. Meanwhile, during our earthly life, the church seeks ecumenical or interreligious collaborations to oppose same-sex marriage, allegedly in the interest of protecting religious freedom. Phrased precisely and without any one-sided moral generalizations, Petrey’s analytical argumentation is convincing; his descriptive argumentative style helps the reader understand the suffering and discrimination non-binary people might face in the church’s daily life. He repeatedly points to the former exclusion of black men (until a 1978 revelation, proclaimed by the church’s president Spencer W. Kimball, reversed this practice) and the ongoing exclusion of women from ordination to the priesthood.
Petrey’s book demonstrates how queer theory is used in US Mormonism, and in doing so substantially contributes to gender and religious studies as well as to Mormon studies. His work enriches the current scholarship from multiple perspectives, as Petrey not only introduces the reader to postwar Mormonism, but also to the doctrinal complexity surrounding the subjects of gender, sexuality, and marriage. He also contextualizes the LDS church, itself born out of the US colonizing history, in legal debates and social movements about gender in US society. In addition to the aforementioned merits, Petrey writes with a consistent and excellent academic style.
Future studies must reckon with Tabernacles of Clay and bring further attention to the diversity of voices in Mormon communities, both in and outside of the United States.
Diana Lunkwitz is associate researcher in the Institute of Religious Studies and Global Christianity at the University of Hamburg.
Diana Lunkwitz
Date Of Review:
January 28, 2023
