Contemporary Femininities in Mormonism and in Ireland: Challenging and Confirming Essentialism in Online Spaces

Abstract

How are gender identities negotiated within Irish Mormonism, and does this intersect with trends identifiable within Mormonism more generally? In this paper I use the examples of modern Ireland and modern Mormonism to speculate regarding the nature of gendered identities online. I suggest that Irish and Mormon cultures are both confronting serious challenges to traditional essentialist interpretations of femininity that have long dominated their cultural landscapes. I also suggest that social media (SM) and online spaces are facilitating these challenges. However, I observe that online spaces are also used in Irish Mormonism to conform to hegemonic Mormon understandings of gender identity. This is in keeping with international trends where we can see that Mormon SM and online engagement are often used to maintain traditional gender roles within the religion.Few people in Ireland are aware that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) has a relatively long history there. Although many Irish may associate the LDS Church with a variety of non-Catholic religions that first took hold on Irish shores in the twentieth century, the first missionaries arrived in Down in the 1840s and in Dublin in 1850. However, fervent opposition both from Catholic clergy and Irish Protestants prevented the LDS Church from strong growth. Since these shaky origins, the LDS Church has struggled to increase its representation amongst the general Irish population. Recent census figures calculate the Mormon population to be 0.03 percent of the general population, spread across the country in just thirteen congregations.1What is the gendered experience of Mormonism in Ireland? The Irish census illustrates marginally more female than male members.2 I have noted elsewhere that the gendered differences between Mormon men and women in Ireland regarding work and caring3 are comparable to the general population.4 Thus, it is not correct to say that this aspect of Mormon gender roles is out of step with Irish society more generally. Contemporary gender in Ireland, like in other social locations, is heavily informed by historical influences, and history is essential. Women's historical role in Irish society has been well documented and is beyond the scope of this paper to encapsulate fully here.5 In summary, the Catholic Church and Irish state deliberately constructed a traditional and limited role for women to support the establishment of a Catholic Ireland in the aftermath of independence from the British in the early twentieth century. Thus, women's role was and still is intimately connected to Irish understandings of nationhood, citizenship, and morality. Ireland's 1937 Constitution provided a limited and specific duty centered around home duties.6 This articulation may remind us of the words of the LDS Church on a similar issue of delineated gender roles provided for by the church: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”7 This “solidification of gendered spheres”8 within Mormonism has ensured that female Irish adherents are surrounded by both a religious and a national culture that have been informed by remarkably similar gendered ideals that emphasized limited and traditional roles for women.However, in contemporary times, the transformation in the position of women in Irish society and culture is clear, as the roles of women in Irish society have vastly expanded. Concomitantly, a growing consumerist, individualist, and competitive culture has also emerged in contemporary Irish society, shaping Irish identities in ways that conflict with the LDS Church's priorities.9 This societal change has transformed the position of women in Irish society but also affected how modern Irish women experience their social identities, including in online spaces. Many Irish women no longer feel constrained by community or religion to conform to essentialist gender roles that are rooted in religious ideologies about appropriate femininity. Young women have been socialized into their gender roles in an era of globalized communications that allow international cultural influences to form part of Irish women's identity creation. SM has facilitated spaces where Irish women can negotiate their own self presentation, both challenging and confirming gendered expectations.10Evaluating these trends, we can see there is a historical truth to the association of women with family and home in Ireland that continues to provide a contemporary legacy. Yet there also exists an individualist postfeminist discourse that encourages women to shape their identities through consumerism, to see themselves as independent individuals disconnected from family, community, or obligations, and to dis-identify with feminism as something that is unnecessary or outdated.11 This reconstruction of modern Irish femininity appears at first to conflict with more traditional understandings of Irish womanhood, but in fact young Irish women are engaged in an integration of the traditional and the modern through a continuing need to identify with Ireland's traditional understanding of womanhood as self-sacrificing, caring, and nurturing.12 That such opposing representations of womanhood exist in Ireland simultaneously creates multifaceted feminine identifications and provides us with a fascinating cultural landscape in which to explore how Mormon understandings of gender relate to this gendered milieu.The remainder of this essay will discuss the role of online spaces and SM in shaping feminine identities, how Mormon and Irish femininities are experienced online, and explain how SM and life online illuminates what at first may appear unclear: the commonalities across Irish and Mormon femininities in a global digital age. Within the European Union, Eurostat13 tells us that 57 percent of EU adults used SM in 2020, up from 36 percent in 2011. Amongst the sixteen-to-twenty-four age group, SM usage is becoming ubiquitous, currently at 86 percent. In Ireland, 61 percent of the population uses SM. Women are the predominant users of many of the most influential SM platforms, though men's use of such platforms is increasing.14 Thus, SM is a gendered landscape, and among younger generations, it is a taken for granted part of their everyday lives. It cannot be overlooked if we are to truly understand how young religious adherents experience their gendered religious identities.Why should we be interested in SM and online platforms to understand contemporary religious and gendered identities? One important issue is that of the negotiation of identity that online technologies and spaces allow. Such identity negotiation undermines essentialist interpretations of gender that have been in evidence in Mormonism and in Irish culture. Of course, this has always happened within religious cultures, and digital spaces are just facilitating these processes of identity in interesting ways, but nonetheless it is clear that participation within digital spaces can lead to adaptations of identity that challenge essentialism.15Within Mormonism, research finds that 19 percent of a sample of Mormon feminists online were male, 81 percent were attending church at least two to three times a month, and 70 percent held a church calling.16 It also shows that Mormon feminists are much more diverse than stereotypes allow and that they deliberately gather online to carve out a space where their Mormon and feminist identities can be reconciled. These samples are subverting the caricatured identity of a “Mormon feminist” by not conforming to expectations of being uniformly female, embittered, and/or inactive church members. Online activism and community building has allowed strict gender roles within Mormonism to be challenged in interesting ways,17 such as through engagement with Mormon feminist blogs.18 Yet these feminists sought out online spaces rather than offline spaces for their activism, which inadvertently may have caused their divergence from hegemonic Mormon culture to be less apparent in their offline lives. From this example we can see that digital spaces allow “conventional” members of the LDS Church to express the “unconventional” aspects of their Mormon identity and negotiate alternative expressions of their identities.Similar use of online spaces to confront essentialist understandings of female identity are also underway in Ireland. Irish feminists’ online activism strongly fueled Ireland's recent campaign to introduce limited legal access to abortion. These activists used digital storytelling to legitimize the marginalized experiences of women who had undergone abortions; to educate the public about the complexity of women, motherhood, and pregnancy; and to illuminate the role of Irish history in shaping our attitudes toward those same topics.19 This illustrates that online spaces are increasingly used by feminists to create community and organize in ways that side-step traditional challenges to face-to-face activism. The research from Jessica Finnegan and Nancy Ross demonstrates that within Mormonism, too, online strategies and spaces are tools to make change and to express aspects of oneself that the everyday culture does not accommodate or understand.As online and offline lives continue to blur, traditional forms of authority on gender both inside and outside religious institutions begin to break down, with potentially significant consequences for both religion and gender. In Ireland, the Catholic Church has lost the power to advise the population on a wide range of social and moral issues as a result of multiple state investigations into widespread abuse and exploitation. This diminishing power was evident during Ireland's recent abortion debates where the Catholic Church's voice was relegated to merely advocating for the continuing ban on abortion through known conservative Catholic public commentators rather than directly through church leadership. Though the Irish Catholic Church did make its position on the issue clear, their presence in the public debate preceding the referendum was more muted than we might have expected.Within Mormonism, too, the influence of SM and other platforms facilitates the emergence of new voices of authority within and outside of Mormonism. Live-tweeting by adherents during the Latter-day Saint general conference, and use of blogs, Facebook, and other platforms to express personal faith, is considered as digital ritual and recreates ordinary members as sources of authority with the power to communicate to wide audiences.20 Those who have left or oppose the LDS Church are also are free to publicize their interpretations of church doctrine and rhetoric instantaneously to wide audiences. We have seen evidence of this on Twitter as the LDS Church attempts (and often fails) to control the narrative regarding the position of LGBTQ members.Online spaces are not just used as locations to develop counter-cultural Mormon identities. They are also used as a powerful tool to facilitate conformity to hegemonic understandings of Mormon gendered identity. Evidence of this comes from Laura Thain, who argues that Mormon “modest fashion” blogs often center around performing appropriate Mormon femininity through clothing and reinforce gendered tradition through cultural production.21 Female-orientated blogs about Mormon family and the “Mormon Mom” SM phenomenon are a now central part of dominant Mormon culture, supporting constructions of Mormon women as home- and family-orientated that Mormons and non-Mormons aspire to.22 Analysis of the LDS Church's high profile “I'm a Mormon” online campaign also illustrates that while the church does makes an effort to show a diverse representation of women, it nonetheless reaffirms traditional gender roles as it primarily emphasizes stay-at-home motherhood above other female identities.23The loosening restrictions on missionaries’ use of SM has also created online opportunities for young Mormon women and men to conform to dominant understandings of a gendered Mormon identity. During the 2020 and 2021 COVID-19 pandemic, missionary SM accounts were vital to the continuation of proselytizing during lockdown restrictions. In Ireland, various missionary online contributions are often centrally distributed through the “Come unto Christ in the RoI” Facebook page for the LDS Church. On Mother's Day 2021, the page posted “Happy Women's Day” along with the hashtags “#mothersday” and “#womensday.” This may have been an attempt to avoid causing offense to female members in Ireland who are not mothers and who feel that the LDS Church's idealization of motherhood is exclusionary. Yet I could not help but feel that the intermingling of the categories of “woman” and “mother” in their post showed no awareness of the distinctiveness of the categories and thus reproduced assumptions within Mormon and Irish culture that to be female is to be a mother, or at least an aspiring mother. This alludes to an essentialist interpretation of womanhood that contradicts the diversity of gendered religious identities we see in Ireland, both inside and outside of Mormonism. A similar post from the Dublin Stake Facebook page in honor of International Women's Day 2021 included the hashtag “#womenspower” alongside “#mothers” “#daughters” “#sisters” “#wives” and “#fiancée.” This appears to imply that women derive their power through their status in relation to someone else, rather than through their own selves and their achievements.Young Irish women must perform a local version of femininity online that simultaneously reflects traditional Irish values of female sacrifice and motherhood alongside trend-driven representations of contemporary femininity through globalized fashion and pop culture.24 Within Mormon culture too, the Mormon Mom blog and SM phenomenon alongside personal and missionary SM profiles allow women to present their religious identities in new ways while still conforming to the dominant values of the culture that surrounds them. That the most successful Mormon SM influencers often use corporate sponsorship to earn incomes, raise their online visibility, and increase their power is also further evidence that a broader reevaluation of what modern femininity is, and should be, is underway within Mormonism as in Ireland and elsewhere.How has the LDS Church responded to these changes and what they represent? Gavin Stuart Feller notes that “it is clear that media function as the material and metaphysical infrastructure of the religion and the interface through which Mormonism positions itself in relation to the world.”25 He observes that the LDS Church has moved from viewing the development of the Internet as an opportunity on par with the development of radio or TV as a means to carry information to a more nuanced evaluation of online engagements, recognizing how such technology also has the capacity to underline and subvert official messaging. The LDS Church's fears in this regard are perhaps evident in the 2018 request by President Nelson that that adherents engage in a ten day “Social Media fast.”26 That this call was issued during the Women's Session of General Conference is highly significant and reveals much about how the LDS Church fears the effects of SM on female adherents specifically. Further evidence of this fear may be apparent in the words of Elder Ballard twenty years ago, who said that “today's popular culture, which is preached by every form of media from the silver screen to the Internet, celebrates the sexy, saucy, socially aggressive woman. These distortions are seeping into the thinking of some of our own women.”27 The use of the phrase “our own women” strikes me as possessive and proprietary. We must hope that perhaps the language used in 2001 would not be used today.However, it seems clear that despite the LDS Church's recent embrace of the potential of SM, there are also concerns about how members’ understandings of their own and others’ femininities may adapt due to the influences that the Internet has facilitated.28 In Ireland, the culture is grappling with rapidly changing understandings of gender that Irish Mormons must navigate as they also work through similar adaptations within their church. The degree to which Irish Mormon women turn to online spaces as a way to proclaim their own interpretations remains to be seen, but undoubtedly we must consider the relationship between gender and Mormonism online if we are to understand gender and Mormonism offline.