Exceptionally Queer

Is there something inherently strange about Mormons and Mormonism? In Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism, K. Mohrman argues that discourses of Mormon peculiarity, both among Mormons and among non-Mormons, do not just name peculiarity but create it. Mohrman asks “when and why Mormonism, Mormons, and the beliefs and practices associated with them have been represented and accepted as inherently peculiar, how this peculiarity has become naturalized as an essential characteristic of Mormonism, and most importantly, what the effects of this naturalization process are” (5). Exceptionally Queer proceeds from 1830 to the present, analyzing discourses of Mormon peculiarity with a particular eye toward how these discourses have functioned in relation to discourses of US exceptionalism.

A key element of Mohrman’s argument about Mormon peculiarity is that it has been crucial to the construction of both Mormonism and America, and that this has been accomplished by constructing an image of Mormon peculiarity that either distinguishes Mormons as deviating from the American mainstream (for Mormons in a positive way, and for non-Mormons in a negative way) or as showing themselves to be the highest manifestation of American exceptionalism. Broadly speaking, these two different attitudes have generally been seen as shifting between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, when Mormons went from being a terrifying civilizational threat to being heralded as exemplars of correct formations of gender, sexuality, and family.

According to Mohrman, although this transition has often been treated as surprising, there were always elements of Mormon life that were very much in accordance with the American project, even during the time when Mormons were framed as anathema to it. For example, despite non-Mormon horror at polygamy, Mohrman argues that Mormons nonetheless “accepted and promoted notions of female subordination through the ideology of domesticity,” which aligned with broader American mores of the time (39). Mohrman embraces the many paradoxes of non-Mormon peculiarity discourse during this period: when Mormon women gained the vote, she notes, those who had grounded their anti-Mormon sentiment in the idea that Mormon women needed to be saved quickly rebuked those same women when they did not use the vote to abolish polygamy and later worked to obstruct federal prosecution of polygamists (79, 135). This sort of paradox is a key facet of Mohrman’s larger argument. “Mormonism,” Mohrman writes in the book’s coda, “emerges as simultaneously, and paradoxically, challenging and conforming, resisting and submitting to the dominant formations of modern biopolitical governance in and by the United States” (309).

Additionally, Mohrman contends that there were many changes underway within Mormonism prior to this shift in perception among non-Mormons that helped it to occur. Specifically, she asserts that Mormon economic practices were an important component of anti-Mormon peculiarity discourse for much of the 19^th century, and that the abandonment of various elements of communal economic practices and the embrace of free-market capitalism were a crucial change that allowed this shift to occur. Later, the Church Welfare Program was a piece of Mormon economic peculiarity that was presented as an example of Mormon self-sufficiency.

Mohrman further posits that, perhaps more than anything else, race and racialization are crucial to understanding Mormon peculiarity discourses. Mohrman is not the first scholar to observe that 19^th century Mormons were not infrequently racialized as non-white. Her contribution in this area stems in part from her questioning of some prior scholarly articulations of this idea. For example, Mohrman rejects the premise of “white Protestant Americans’ denial or obfuscation of Mormons’ supposedly obvious whiteness” (49). She writes that even though these framings seek to explore the social construction of race, “they simultaneously and paradoxically adhere to a kind of pseudobiological framework that insists that race is always embedded within or visible upon the body” (49).

Mohrman analyzes 19^th century Mormon peculiarity discourses around race in relation to Native Americans and Black people, as well as Orientalist discourses that targeted polygamy and other practices. As part of these analyses, Mohrman examines more than thirty political cartoons, reproduced for the reader to view. While her examination of these cartoons is valuable, the sheer number of them feels unnecessary, and her arguments could have been made effectively with fewer of them. In the chapter, “Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960-1982,” Mohrman heavily engages the activism of Black athletes who boycotted games with Brigham Young University and took other actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She contends that, rather than negatively impacting the church’s image, peculiarity discourse in American media (outside of Black newspapers and a few other outlets) constructed Mormons’ priesthood and temple ban as a harmless anachronism and denigrated Black athletes’ activism. Mohrman carries her analysis of this particular strain of 19^th-century peculiarity discourse (constructing Mormons as almost charmingly old-fashioned rather than troublingly retrograde, as they had been in the nineteenth century) forward into her examination of the court cases Kitchen v. Herbert and Brown v. Buhman—centered on Utah’s same-sex marriage ban and Utah’s criminal polygamy law, respectively—which closes out the book.

Exceptionally Queer makes a significant contribution to Mormon studies. Mohrman’s deep engagement with queer of color critique, ethnic and Native studies, and anti/postcolonial critique allow her to approach oft-revisited topics in the field with a fresh lens. While other Mormon studies scholarship has engaged these fields to varying degrees, Exceptionally Queer centers them in especially productive ways.

Alexandria Griffin is a visiting assistant professor of religion at New College of Florida.

Alexandria Griffin

Date Of Review:

June 30, 2023