For my first column of 2011, I am offering a bit of a cheat: an excerpt from a paper I prepared for the 2010 meeting of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. (This also offers me, conveniently, the opportunity to publicize the 2011 meeting of that organization: the call for papers on the topic of embodiment may be of interest to readers of this column; submissions are due by January 10, and details can be found here.)
In the full paper I took a stab at working out a Mormon theory of gender. As part of that project I worked out a distinction between what I called "Mormon formalism," our love of institutions and rules, and the specific, mutable social forms that structure Mormon lived experience. I connect the idea of a Mormon formalism to a process of icon-making at the heart of what we might call Mormonism's "ideological work," and the result is a set of ideas with implications that reach beyond the revealed meaning of gender to the very process of revelation itself.
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