DiaBLOGue

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

April 12, 2022

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

I Am a Child of Gods

April 12, 2022

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 99–118
Mormon feminists should consider how to better include intersex, nonbinary, and trans women in their ambitions. Queerness is more than homosexuality.

A Queer Heavenly Family: Expanding Godhood Beyond a Heterosexual, Cisgender Couple

April 12, 2022

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 69–98
Although the concept of Heavenly Mother is empowering for many women, the focus on God as a cisgender, heterosexual couple also limits who can see their own divinity reflected in the stories told about God. First, with Heavenly Mother as the only female divinity, divine expression of womanhood is restricted to motherhood. This excludes many women, including women struggling with infertility, women who do not wish to become mothers, and transgender women who experience motherhood differently than fertile, cisgender women.

In Defense of Heavenly Mother: Her Critical Importance for Mormon Culture and Theology

April 12, 2022

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 37
Marginalizing God the Mother does not solve the problems raised by Mormonism’s doctrine of divine and human embodiment. It merely diminishes femaleness as a reflection of divinity. We do not need fewer images to understand God; we need more. Critics of Heavenly Mother have not fully grasped the negative consequences of moving toward a God beyond gender