DiaBLOGue

Women’s Lived Experience as Authority: Antenarratives and Interactional Power as Tools for Engagement

April 28, 2020

After presenting my research on 1970s Mormon motherhood at a national rhetoric conference in 2017, a woman in the audience (also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) called my research “old news” and made some harsh and disparaging remarks about my analysis. I was upset by her comments, but one of my co-panelists defended me, and after the presentation, five people came up to talk with me about my research in positive terms. One master’s student wanted to know how she could do similar research.

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

April 28, 2020

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

April 28, 2020

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 5–32
I cannot help but smile when she calls me hermana, her “sister.” Her reference to me signifies a dual meaning: I am not only like a family member to her, but additionally, the term hermana is used among Spanish-speaking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons) to signify solidarity and integration with one another.

Mormon Women Claiming Power

April 28, 2020

As the editor of Exponent II, I have had innumerable Mormon men—progressive and orthodox—tell me that they would like to listen to women, but women just don’t step up and talk. From President Russell M.…

Dealing with Difficult Questions

January 24, 2020

The stake presidency has asked the high council to address the topic “reduce and simplify our lives to minimize the commotion prophesied by the Lord.” I’ve felt impressed to talk about a different kind of com motion today, one that the Church and its members are facing in our information-saturated world, and a different kind of simplicity, one that is very elusive and that may take a lifetime to find. I hope you’ll forgive me for following a written text fairly closely, but I’m a writer, not a speaker, and because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I want to make sure I am as precise as possible. 

Lessons from Baltimore’s Black Mormon Matriarchs on Discovering God’s Compassion | Laura Rutter Strickling, On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City

January 24, 2020

“Dear God, Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me,” Alice Walker’s main character Celie writes at the start of The Color Purple.Similarly, Georgia, a real-life Black Mormon woman in current-day Baltimore stands up in testimony meeting with a written poem in hand: 

Heavenly Father 
I don’t understand 
why my tears 
fall on deaf ears.

A Barometer for Mormon Social Science | Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church.

January 24, 2020

Latter-day Saints studies has long remained the prerogative of scholars in the humanities, lacking commensurate scholarly attention in the social sciences. Periodically, however, a promising piece of social science research is promulgated by investigators seeking to understand the Mormon movement “on the ground.” Though usually insightful, these comparatively rare works vary with respect to ambition and sophistication.