3. THE PERFORMANCE OF NORMATIVITY: MORMONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN AMERICAN MASCULINITY

Abstract

In this essay I argue that men in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) have consciously adopted the ideal American masculine performance. I define this ideal through R. W. B. Lewis' book, American Adam (1959), in which he explains the symbolic relationship between the nineteenth-century American man and the Biblical Adam. I argue that Mormon men, by embracing the role of the American Adam, mastered the performance of normativity while maintaining their abject identity. Mormons have relished their outsider status, often calling themselves peculiar people. Their unabashed peculiarity helped secure their abjection from American culture in the nineteenth and led to the development of distinctly Mormon masculinity, one that passes for the ideal American masculinity. I explore early Mormon history to explain the value of abjection for Mormons, and I consider the implications of performance of normativity staged from position of abjection. Mormons: A normative minority A documentary produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons), Roots of an American Prophet: the Docudrama of the Restoration, depicts their founder, Joseph Smith, as quintessential American: It was no accident that the Lord spoke to an American boy; not scholar or religious leader for they all trusted in the wisdom they already had, and not to the citizen of any other land, for only in was there freedom enough for new religion to survive. Only was filled with enough free-thinking independent people to form the nucleus of the Church that the Lord had promised to restore. (Brown, 2002) history of Joseph Smith, according to the LDS Church, is also the history of growing America. In his book, and the American Experience, Klaus J. Hansen (1981) extends the relationship between Smith and American history to relationship between and America, The birth of coincided with the birth of modern America (p. 45). Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling (2000), in their study of contemporary Mormon America: the Power and the Promise, explain, Mormonism began as, and still is, uniquely American faith (p. xviii). Mormon theology, according to the Ostlings, wove scriptural pre-ordination into the foundation of the United States of America: Mormonism, as the movement was quickly nicknamed, provided nationalistic Americans with very American gospel (p. xix). Ostlings describe Mormons as a model minority, hardworking people with more education than the American average, deeply committed to church and family (pp. xx-xxiv). These virtues the Ostlings use to describe Mormons are also the virtues idealistically used to define the great American man. R. Lawrence Moore (1986), in his book, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, writes: If inculcation in the work ethic was the hallmark of true Americanism in the nineteenth-century, then Mormons were the super Americans of that century (p. 31). Not only are Mormons linked to through their history and their theology, they are linked through the performance of their identity. Accordingly, Mormon men might be considered the ideal example of American men, but as minority group, they are also considered the other. Hansen (1981) qualifies contemporary descriptions of the Latter-day Saints as super-American with the realities of nineteenth perceptions of Mormons: Yet for all the apparent Americanism, was consistently seen as un- and anti-American (p. xiii). Ostlings also acknowledge such negative stereotypes that they contend still permeate twenty-first images of Mormons. persistence of these stereotypes has prompted LDS leaders and rank-and-file members to become obsessed with their image, wanting desperately to avoid accusations that they are merely cult and not real religion. …