Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Brenda R. Weber
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9781478004868

ISBN 10:   147800486
Pages:   384
Publication Date:   13 September 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments  ix Past as Prologue: Latter-day Screens and History  1 Introduction. ""Well, We Are a Curiosity, Ain't We?"": Mediated Mormonism  13 1. Mormonism as Meme and Analytic: Spiritual Neoliberalism, Image Management, and Transmediated Salvation  49 2. The Mormon Glow: The Raced and Gendered Implications of Spectacular Visibility  91 3. The Epistemology of the (Televised, Polygamous) Closet: The Cultural Politics of Mediated Mormonism and the Promises of the American Dream   120 4. Polygamy USA: Visability, Charismatic Evil, and Gender Progressivism  162 5. Gender Trouble in Happy Valley: Choice, Affect, and Mormon Feminist Housewives  201 6. ""Pray (and Obey) the Gay Away"": Conscience and the Queer Politics of Desire  241 Conclusion. Afterthoughts and Latter Days  276 Epilogue. Mormons on My Mind, or, Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Hegemony I Learned in Mesa, Arizona  284 Notes  309 References  329 Media Archive  345 Index  361"

Reviews

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 *

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 * 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 * 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 *

Author Information

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.

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