Mormon Studies Review
Keywords
queer, gender, Mormonism, sexuality, epistemology
Abstract
Taylor G. Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism uses a word that has an activist past and an electric capacity. This is a word also worn out by its bandying; it is a word perhaps nearing retirement. That word is queer. Tabernacles of Clay is not a book about queer life. It is not a book with any people who call themselves queer, or think within the traditions of queer political activism, or who articulate feelings of queer temporality, queer kinship, or queer emplacement. It is not a book written in a queer way or arguing for new methods for queer epistemology. But it is a book that, for its author, needs queer thought to exist. Thinking about what this term is doing for Petrey and for his description of gender in modern Mormonism focuses what follows. I begin with trepidation and complicity: it is not simple to observe that how a scholar uses a word is dissatisfying, and any criticism mounted should include the critic as subject to it.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Lofton, Kathryn
(2022)
"No Queers Here,"
Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9:
No.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/8