Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism

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Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism

by Brenda R. Weber

Duke University Press, 2019

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-4780-0426-4

Paper: 978-1-4780-0486-8

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9022-9 (OA)

eISBN: 978-1-4780-0529-2 (standard)

About the Book

From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion. In this, mediated Mormonism and the conversations on social justice that it fosters create the pathway toward an inclusive, feminist-friendly, and queer-positive future for a broader culture that uses Mormonism as a gauge to calibrate its own values.

About the Author

Brenda R. Weber is Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, editor of Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, and author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“Smart, sassy, and full of provocative insight, this book shines a light on Mormonism, not as a religious tradition but as a ubiquitous cultural trope that is uniquely attuned to queerly mediated notions of sexuality and gender.”

-- Dana Heller, editor of Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus

“Latter-day Screens is an amazing encyclopedic survey of the details of the Mormon Church and the place of Mormons in American popular culture. Drawing on cultural theories of mediation, mass culture, and film studies, Brenda R. Weber draws the reader into everything from aromatherapy oils to South Park parodies. Timely and relevant, and teachable for a range of classes, Latter-day Screens is an exceedingly important and interesting book.”

-- Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Seeing Race in Modern America

"In Latter-day Screens, gender studies professor Brenda R. Weber examines pop culture’s ongoing fascination with Mormons. Mainstream media has given us a largely one-dimensional view of Mormonism: Sister Wives, Big Love, and even storylines on Love After Lockup present polygamy as the sum total of the religion. But Weber has another story to tell, one that’s about how Mormons are using pop culture—including TV shows, books, and YouTube videos—to find and enact their agency and rethink their conservative religion’s understanding of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, and justice."

-- Evette Dionne Bitch

"A deep, provocative look at mass and social media portrayals of Mormons on the parts of both Mormons and non-Mormons. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."

-- R. L. Saunders Choice

"With its informative and enriching contextualization of its sources, Latter-day Screens provides a significant critical reading of Mormon media sources while also functioning as an innovative approach to Mormonism."

-- Marie-Therese Mäder Religion

"Weber makes a series of arguments, deeply informed by theories in media studies and gender and sexuality studies, about the interplay among actual Mormons and media characterizations of them. In the burgeoning field of Mormon Studies, this is a fresh approach."

-- W. Michael Ashcraft International Journal of the Study of New Religions

"Engagingly written and insightfully argued, Latter-day Screens is a timely contribution to our understanding of the evolving relationship between Mormonism and American media."
-- Andrew Patrick Nelson Mormon Studies Review