Mormonism in the History of Sexuality

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-224
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Contacts ◽  
And Gender

This book has explored one example of a set of teachings that are widely believed to be quite stable in Mormonism but have actually been open to dramatic changes. LDS teachings about marriage, gender roles, sexual difference, and sexuality have undergone remarkable transformation since World War II. Teachings on marriage, sexual practices within marriage, and gender roles all trended toward greater liberalization during the period of modern Mormonism, even if they lagged behind broader cultural changes. But this progress had its trade-offs. Latter-day Saints could accommodate liberalizing trends on race, marriage, sexual contacts, birth control, and gender roles in part because their attention focused on homosexuality as a particularly egregious problem.

Tabernacles of Clay

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Taylor G. Petrey’s trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself. As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to “cure” homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.

Modern Mormonism and Gender Theory in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
World War ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

The introduction sets the parameters of the book’s focus on Modern Mormonism in America, which arises after World War II. It further sets this period in the context of gender theory and the history of sexuality, to explore how Mormon approaches to these topics are situated between competing theories of sexual difference in modernity, gender essentialism and gender fluidity.

Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 134-138
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

After her death, Jane James faded into obscurity until the late twentieth century, when she gained new fame. Mormons used her story to reimagine their church as racially diverse and Joseph Smith as racially egalitarian. For historians of American religion and others, James’s story gives the history of Mormonism from below and shows the limits of Mormonism’s democratizing impulse. It illustrates the variety of Mormon religious experience and shows the limits of focusing on temple rituals and priesthood. James’s Mormonism differed from that of other Latter-day Saints and thus illustrates how race and gender shaped ways of being Mormon. James also shaped Mormon history in subtle but crucial ways. Her presence in present-day LDS discourses suggests that she has finally achieved what she worked so hard for during her life: Mormons of all races now hold her in “honourable remembrance,” as her second patriarchal blessing promised her.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Caroline Mezger
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Different Levels

This chapter introduces the book’s key themes, historiographic framework, and research questions. It situates the book at the confluence of studies on National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, experiences of Axis occupation during World War II, minorities and borderland nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe, and the history of childhood and youth. Upon providing a brief historic overview of the ethnic Germans (Donauschwaben) in northern Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and outlining the book’s key historiographic contributions, it reflects on the book’s multiscalar approach of interweaving archival, press, and original oral history sources to juxtapose and intertwine different levels of analysis. The chapter suggests that studying childhood and youth mobilization enables insight into larger historic conundrums, such as the interplay between categories like age, (ascribed) nationality, and gender in shaping historical experiences; the interaction between nationalizing forces “from above” and the lived, subjective experience of nationality “from below”; and questions of individual and collective agency in contexts of occupation and war. It presents the book’s main argument, that children and youth confronted with nationalizing projects themselves became agents of nationalization.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

scholarly journals Peran Gender dalam Hubungan Seks pada Wanita Hamil

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-149
Author(s):  
Budi Asty Andini ◽  
Khobibah Khobibah ◽  
Mimi Ruspita
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Total Sample ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Relationship

Background: Sexual intercourse during pregnancy is a physiological need for pregnant women that is influenced by factors of perception from within oneself and previous experience and gender role factors in the family with the aim of knowing the relationship between gender roles and sexual relations in pregnant women. Methods: Non-experimental research with a population of all pregnant women in the village of Curugsewu in the District of Patean. The total sample of pregnant women receiving antenatal care was 30 with the Kendal statistical test. Results: significance T = 0.022 <0.005 there is a relationship between gender roles and sexual relations of sufficient strength in the negative direction -391*.Conclusion: there is a relationship between gender roles and sexual relations, the husband's role is very dominant but the frequency of sex in early pregnancy is largely not done because it is influenced by cultural factors and a history of previous abortion sex.

Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN SHAROT
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Male Gender ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
The Cross ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Gender Roles

A combination of social and cultural changes account for the popularity of, and the narrative permutations of class and gender in, the cross-class romance films of the 1930s. The analysis is based on a sample of eighty-five cross-class romance films released in the 1929–39 period. The films deal with a dilemma evident in the choice of partners: between interests of wealth and social status and the value of romantic, disinterested love, an ideal which had spread throughout the class structure. Gender distinctions are reinforced by narratives in which the wealthy male is redeemed by the poor female so that he can perform the appropriate male gender roles. When the female is wealthy, the poor male insists on her economic dependence on him. Films with gold diggers reached a peak in the early 1930s and provided imaginary solutions to social anxieties about class and gender among both women and men.

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