Princesses, Tomboys and ‘gender theory’: film, family and school as symbolic battlegrounds in the culture wars of twenty-first-century France

Reviewed by: postcolonial-queer: Erkundungen in Theorie und Literatur by Anna Babka Katherine Arens Anna Babka, postcolonial-queer: Erkundungen in Theorie und Literatur. Vienna, Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2019. 304 pp. Anna Babka's postcolonial-queer is one of those monographs that elicits gratitude, as it is broad in scope, informative, gracefully written, and well worth [End Page 160] revisiting because of the author's pronounced ability to synthesize and exemplify a wide range of contemporary theories and exemplary scholarship. The chapters are drawn from earlier publications, but they have been woven together to form an original contribution to today's cultural-theoretical feminist discourses. The volume starts with an introduction that tracks the intersections between today's gender, queer, and postcolonial studies as the driving interdisciplinary site appropriate for today's academic literary and cultural studies, starting with cogent definitions of the assumptions associated with these bodies of theory: Eben das, was Derrida fragend anspricht, das, was zwischen den Disziplinen geschieht, wird im hier vorliegenden Band durch die genuin transdisziplinären Gender-, Queer und Postcolonial Studies einer möglichen Lesart, einer möglichen Perspektive zugeführt. Entlang zentraler Ansätze poststrukturalistischer Theoriebildung, wie der écriture feminine oder maßgeblicher Konzepte der Gender-, Queer- und Postcolonial Studies, wie etwa Identität, Alterität, Zentrum, Peripherie, Hybridität, "dritter Raum" / "drittes Geschlecht," wird die Verhandlung verschiedener Achsen der Differenz reflektiert und literarisch erkundet. (29) The six chapters in the volume's first part following this introduction offer solid, nuanced discussions of the most influential voices in these major areas of contemporary scholarship, offering succinct overviews of how these scholarly projects have evolved, principally in US and Germanophone contexts. The first chapter, "Zur Verwobenheit von Gender Studies, Queer Studies & Postcolonial Studies," makes the brave choice of working conceptually instead of chronologically. In consequence, Babka's work starts with the newest generation of hybrid theory that combines race and gender, starting with Kimberle Crenshaw and Kien Nghi Ha in German, but then proceeds to differentiate it carefully from postcolonial gender studies, the latter of which is much more pronounced in European feminist theory than in US/UK ones. In this chapter, Babka shows off her work's great strength: in all cases, she cites foundational literature in theory (e.g., Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, the work of the Combahee River Collective) and then brings the individual project forward into the newest generation. In this sense, postcolonial-queer can serve as a research guide—particularly important for US GermanistInnen, because their work is all too often done without reference to foundational [End Page 161] terminology in anglophone feminist studies, particularly by theorists of color, or to the Marxist contexts of much first- and second-generation African-American theorists. Similarly, Babka always explains how terms have mutated between disciplinary contexts and within national projects and tracks how terms have crossed national lines as well. Subsequent chapters are then classified into conceptual clusters: "Denkräume" (discussing Spivak and Othering), "Denkfiguren" (Derrida, Butler, and Bettine Menke, reading in one chapter Derrida and Nietzsche so as to evolve a broader idea of the feminine, and then in another Butler's performativity and "colonial Mimicry" in Homi Bhabha), and then once again "Denkräume" (this time about Trinh Minh-Ha and postcolonial feminisms). The first section closes with a discussion of postcolonial and queer theory in Germanistik, speaking about textual canons in literary studies and the need for ongoing self-interrogation of criticism. In all cases her relating of gender identity and cultural positioning is exemplary—a fine reading of two bodies of theory, astutely combined to reframe our contemporary understandings of inherited problems in gender theory. The second large section of the book is devoted to case study readings that show the potential of newly posed approaches to textual reading over queer and postcolonial theory. The first series of cases represents texts from early modern German literatures: Kleist's Marionettentheater is read queer, Karl May's In den Schluchten des Balkan (1892) is read postcolonially, as are then Robert Michel's Die Verhüllte (1907) and Else Lasker-Schüler's Der Prinz von Theben (1914) (the latter with specific reference to Expressionism and oriental miniatures). The...

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

About the Contributors

Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

About the Contributors

Review Article| September 01 2007 You! hypocrite lecteur! New Readings of T. S. Eliot Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, edited by Laity, Cassandra; Gish, Nancy K., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 265 pages. Carrie J. Preston Carrie J. Preston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2007) 53 (3): 414–420. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2007-4008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Carrie J. Preston; You! hypocrite lecteur! New Readings of T. S. Eliot. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2007; 53 (3): 414–420. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2007-4008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas Jens Damm (bio) Song Hwee Lim. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘I Press, 2006. 247 pp. Paperback $54.00, ISBN: 978–0–8248–2909–4. Song Hwee Lim’s Celluloid Comrades is one of the most outstanding works on queer representation in Chinese cinemas. The title refers to the popular term tongzhi (comrade), which is widely used in academic discourses referring to “queer” and “gay and lesbian.” The work is divided into six chapters; the introduction and the first chapter deal specifically with theoretical questions, while the following five chapters present one or two movies as examples of a particular perspective. In the introduction, Lim first dwells on the difficult question of how to define “Chineseness,” seeming to share Ray Chow’s (2000) view1 that any essential definition should be avoided; an effort should be made, instead, to challenge the picture of a “homogenously unified, univocal China.” The cinematic representation of homosexuality is understood as part of a deconstruction project; awkward questions can thus be avoided concerning the inclusion of films by Taiwanese directors that are aimed either at the Taiwanese independence market or at a purely international audience. Lim also questions the idea of a “transnational Chinese cinema”2 (Sheldon Hsio-peng Lu 1997, p. 3) and a “Chinese-language cinema”3 (Yueh-yu Yeh 1998), avoiding the issue of “Chineseness” by proposing to examine the function served by each specific configuration, that is, the highlighting of the legitimizing discourse behind various films and their differences (p. 6). Lim, in addition, provides a comprehensive overview of various terms, such as “homosexual,” “queer,” “gay,” and “lesbian” and the Chinese tongzhi (comrades), or tongxianglian, and the difficulties of employing one of these as a generally “objective term” (pp. 7–13). In general, Lim’s work builds on three different academic disciplines: Chinese studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and cinema studies. He employs critical theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies as a theoretical background (pp. 13–34). He is also aware of the “real world” underlying the problem of homosexuality and in an excursus he talks about the problem of same-sex desire in China, where it is subject to “administrative and party disciplinary action” (Li Yinhe 1998);4 this makes open discussion of the topic in films and other media rather difficult (pp. 28–33). Taiwan, on the other hand, is known for its vibrant—commercialized and academic—gay/lesbian/queer movement and representation, and can without doubt be described as the most tolerant of all Chinese (huaren) societies (pp. 33–37). Hong Kong is somewhere in the middle: male homosexuality was decriminalized in Hong Kong a decade after it was decriminalized in Great Britain, but homosexuality was and always has been stigmatized in conservative society (pp. 37–40). [End Page 166] In chapter 1, “Screening Homosexuality” (pp. 19–40), Lim provides an overview of the representation of homosexuality in movies from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan with the respective societal backgrounds, political changes, and influences, ranging from censorship in the PRC to the state-sponsored production of movies in Taiwan. He draws our attention to the topic of homosexuality in movies such as The Wedding Banquet, Farewell My Concubine, and The River, but also explains the reasons for the great popularity of Chinese cinema on global screens in the 1990s, mentioning a wide range of films, from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the much more complex adaption of typical Hong Kong movie scenes in the Matrix trilogy by the choreographer Yuen Wo-ping (p. 19). Two very different sources contributed to the success of these films: in the PRC, it was the Fifth Generation directors, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution whose films led Chinese intellectuals to reflect on their own history. In Taiwan, it was the new Taiwan cinema with Hou Hsiaohsien and Edward Yang, who employed a postcolonial approach to focus on the everyday lives of citizens, thus questioning the long years of authoritarian and elitist rule under the Kuomintang (p. 20). After...

In this chapter, I shall look at definitions and terminology covering issues such as what the label ‘queer’ actually describes and how women in all their diversity can possibly be defined under one label or banner. I will also consider some of the critiques of feminism which have come from some sections of academic scholarship, such as queer politics and poststructuralist theory; critiques which usually rely on the charge that feminism is essentialist. I will introduce theory from famous scholars such as the philosopher Judith Butler, who has posed questions for feminism and introduced many contemporary activists to queer theory and queer politics. Queer theory is informed by postmodernism and is associated with the academic study of sex, gender and sexuality. Scholar Gayle Rubin (1984) suggests that whereas feminist theory is about the study of gender oppression, queer theory is the study of gender as a whole, including all the different kinds of gendered and sexed identities, identifications, possibilities, sexualities and sex and gender minorities.

Reviewed by: The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger Evan Litwack Anne Emmanuelle Berger. The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-082-35385-2 Anne Emmanuelle Berger's The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender gives us fresh and exciting ways to consider—and consider anew—the conceptual and linguistic traffic between French and American theories of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the centrality of the idiom of performance to the making and remaking of modern feminist and queer knowledge domains. By carefully following "the aporias, the dissonances, even the productive inconsistencies" (4) that emerge as gender theories and their queer theoretical cognates move back and forth across the Atlantic, Berger stages a rigorous transnational account of the complex maneuvers through which concepts travel and travail across national and cultural borders. Unfolding across five somewhat discrete chapters, The Queer Turn in Feminism is distinctively attentive not only to that decidedly American design called "French theory," but also to a newer intellectual formation that is perhaps less widely known to U.S. audiences: the recently christened French invention named "American thought," around which the rise of gender studies has come to prominence in contemporary France. The view that gender is performative has, of course, achieved something of an axiomatic status for scholars working in or in between the fields of [End Page 199] feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. While this widely institutionalized conceptual frame may now bear the unfortunate mark of a certain obviousness, as Berger forcefully reminds us, it is nonetheless crucial. For what remains buried beneath at least twenty-some-odd years of U.S. left critical academic common sense are the variegated Franco-American geohistorical conditions of production, circulation, and reception that have allowed three interdisciplinary knowledge projects—feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies—to share the same language even, if not especially, when they do not speak the same dialect. Judith Butler, for instance, famously put into conversation two nationally marked theoretics when she drew on philosophical resources from Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (in short, "French theory") in order to contribute to a theatrically tinctured conception of gender (a term germane to the postwar American social sciences). The result, of course, was her now canonical account of gender as "a stylized repetition of acts" rendered socially intelligible by what she termed "the heterosexual matrix" (1990, 192). Berger thus presses us to ask: to what extent is gender performativity, an idea foundational if not altogether constitutive of the "'queering' of feminist thought" (5), a properly French or American formulation? In chapter 1, Berger situates herself as "participant-observer" (3) of sorts uniquely poised to pursue such complex quandaries. A French national who arrived at Cornell University in the 1980s during the heyday of French post-structuralism and its thinking of sexual difference, Berger then returned to France seven years into the next millennium at the very moment that American gender theory was being institutionalized in the French academy. This autobiographical detail is important because it highlights not only Berger's own particular standpoint of critical reception, but also keenly registers a larger historical narrative about gender studies' transatlantic residence and, indeed, resonance. If by 2007, as Berger argues, gender studies had waned in prominence in the U.S. university (she cites as evidence Butler's turn from gender to ethics and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's turn from sexuality to affect), in France, conversely, gender studies now feels "quite current" (2). By calling attention to the entangled temporalities of gender studies' transnational institutionalization, Berger impresses the need to rethink "on the one hand, a politics and a conception of genders and, on the other hand, the languages and cultures in which or from which this politics and this conception are being developed" (4). Berger's second chapter constitutes the centerpiece of The Queer Turn in Feminism. Here, Berger sets as her task to scrutinize how "American gender theory has always been 'queer'" (14). This task is set to work by way...

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic chōra continues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction in La revolution du langage poétique – the fate of the chōra was left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive conception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of the chora with the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding the chōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semiotic chōra does indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by adding chōros, the masculine form of chōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

Feminist, queer, and transgender theory has developed an array of fruitful concepts for the study of gender. It offers critiques of patriarchy, the gender binary, compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity, inter alia. New Materialist feminists have analyzed gender variance, continuous variation, and continuous transition through concepts such as rhizome, assemblage, making kin, and sym-poiesis (making-with). Feminists of color and postcolonial feminists have theorized intersectionality—that gender always-already intersects with race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—and gender roles outside the white middle-class nuclear family, such as othermothering and fictive kin. Materialist feminists have studied gender as social class, while psychoanalytic gender theorists have explored gender as self-identification and in terms of the relation of gender identification and desire. Queer theory has explored vexed gender identifications and disidentification as well as heterotopias, counterpublic spaces, and queer kinship beyond the private/public divide. Transgender theory has critiqued transmisogyny and theorized transgender and trans* identities. Indigenous feminist and queer theory has theorized Two-Spirit identities and queer indigeneity in the context of a decolonial vision. Theorists of masculinities have analyzed masculinities as historically specific, plural, and intersectional. Gender studies, in all this diversity, has influenced most fields of study—for example, disability studies in its theorization of complex embodiment, its development of crip theory, and so on. Gender studies, in turn, has greatly benefitted from the study of literature. Literature has been indispensable in the genealogy of dominant gender norms such as the 19th-century norms of the angelic/demonic woman and self-made man. In return, gender theory has offered fresh insights into literary genre, for example the Bildungsroman. Since the development of gender theory, it has taken part in an ongoing dialogue and cross-fertilization with literature, evidenced in self-reflexive and critically informed literary texts as well as in gender theory that includes autobiographical and literary (e.g., narrative, figurative, fictional, poetic) elements.

LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics cover an umbrella of approaches to biblical literature, its historical contexts, its reception, and its ongoing uses today. These approaches take root around LGBTIA2Q+ folks—i.e., people who identify as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, asexual/ace, two-spirit, and queer, with the plus indicating the many other queer and trans identities that exist beyond this acronym (e.g., pansexual, nonbinary). LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics include readings by LGBTIA2Q+-identified scholars who read biblical texts from explicitly queer/trans perspectives; readings that analyze LGBTIA2Q+ presence in biblical literature and texts that support queer/transphobic oppressions; considerations of the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient texts and contexts; and readings that draw from wider queer and trans studies to bring their ideas into biblical studies. LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics began entering the field in recognizable quantity in the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of LGBTIA2Q+ activism during the height the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the coining (by Teresa De Lauretis in 1990) and subsequent explosion of “queer theory” as a field of inquiry. LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics have been a recognized unit of the Society of Biblical Literature since 2006, with intersex identity being added to the title in 2015. Although they are still often dismissed within the norms of biblical studies, LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics have, since 2000, grown expansive in their contributions to the field. LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics can be categorized under the umbrella of ideological methods that critically reflect on the identity and social location of the scholar and insist upon centering marginalized and minoritized perspectives. LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics are impossible without—and, indeed, inseparable from—feminist, postcolonial, African and African American, womanist, Asian and Asian American, Latino/a, Islands and Islanders, and disability hermeneutics. LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics blur with studies of gender and sexuality in the Bible. While many LGBTI/Queer scholars frame their work within this broader study, this bibliography emphasizes scholarship that explicitly names its perspective as queer, trans, and/or rooted in LGBTIA2Q+ politics or identities. This does not deny the importance of the study of sexuality and gender in the Bible/biblical world to LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics, but it is important to acknowledge how explicitly LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutical work is more likely to be dismissed. The scholarship that falls under this umbrella vastly exceeds this overview’s attempt to define LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics, much like all queerness inherently exceeds any attempt to contain it. Researchers are encouraged to use this overview to orient them to the resources that follow—in the hope that, as they engage the scholarship, they will reorient it from their own queer and trans perspectives.

Postcolonial theory has been embraced and critiqued by various scholars since the 1980s. Central to the field of postcolonial studies is the examination of colonial episteme and discourse, European racism, and imperial dominance. Broadly, postcolonialism analyzes the effects, and enduring legacies, of colonialism and disavows Eurocentric master-narratives. Postcolonial ideas have been significant to several academic disciplines, largely those in the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural and literary studies, anthropology, political science, history, development studies, geography, urban studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The key scholars that are connected to postcolonial theory, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have been critiqued for grounding their work in the Western theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Given the predominant association of these three scholars to postcolonial theory, Africanists have argued that postcolonial theory is dismissive of African theorizing. Moreover, some scholars have noted that Africanists have hesitated to use postcolonial theory because it is too discursive and has limited applicability to material reality. As such, the relevancy of postcolonial theory to Africa has been a repetitive question for decades. Despite this line of questioning, some scholars have posited that there are African thinkers and activists who are intellectual antecedents to the postcolonial thought that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, other Africanist scholars have engaged with the colonial discursive construction of African subjectivities and societies as inferior. These engagements have been particularly salient in women and gender studies, urban studies and studies of identity and global belonging.

The aim of this contribution is to identify how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system in post-socialist Albania. In Albania, the post-socialist context was featured by a negative connotation of the left-wing perspective hindering the development of critical and feminist thinking in academia. There is a lack of feminist debate, and hostile prejudices against feminists stick well, particularly in the absence of a thorough debate about feminism. Gender and women’s studies are present mainly in the public university system in association with the Social Sciences Faculty. The only complete program on gender studies is situated within the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, as a Master program in Gender and Development. Gender or feminist studies are mostly taught as “optional” courses often just for the sake of having them present in the program. In this contribution, we aim at briefly presenting some of the main developments, gaps and challenges regarding gender and feminist studies in the Albanian higher education.

Taylor G. Petrey'sTabernacles 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.The bulk of Petrey's book offers a series of examples to illustrate how senior leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—all of them, as he acknowledges, older, male, White, straight-identified—shaped the gendered ideas of that community since 1945. Petrey offers an effective sketch of how Latter-day Saint leadership interpreted the shifting landscape of gender of the last seventy years as a kind of discursive obstacle course to arrive, friendly-like, at the right heterosexual family. Petrey wants to capture the polemical thrust of a tradition managed by high-level male bureaucrats who speak and engage laity with great consciousness of the effect of their speech. He knows this is not a social history of domestic life, an ethnography of sexual practice, or a theorizing work about gender and ecclesiology. It is a run-down of the available record of comment by apostles, members of the First Presidency, and Brigham Young University presidents, showing just how hard Mormon leadership worked to make sure Mormons were never confused about the kind of sex they were supposed to have or what person they were supposed to grab onto, ritually, for it.Petrey's research leads him to organize his chapters around the Latter-day Saint “areas of activity” regarding gender (2). These areas of activity are the production of preaching campaigns, and related teaching curriculum, about sexual purity, gender roles, and marriage; the development of new institutions to propagate psychological techniques to cure homosexuality; and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage. Although the latter sociopolitical interventions are how Mormons most prominently appeared in the public sphere, Petrey makes clear such electoral and legislative engagement was a slow coming out for a community that, for a significant portion of the twentieth century, just wanted to blend in. Mormons only began to broadcast their homophobia once they could sense they had synchronized their sensibilities with the very bloc that long burnt them at the figurative stake—namely, White evangelicals. Evangelicals and Mormons were old enemies now friends with new enemies: queers and the women and men they made messily less-so with their seductive talk of gender nonconformity.“Areas of activity” is an apt classification of a community enraptured with a wholly de-sexed metaphor of the beehive. It also roots the book in the perspective of Mormon leadership. This is a book not only about Mormon leaders and what they do, but one that also models, in its narrative focus, the uncontested discursive vacuum in which church bureaucracies can function, especially in academic thinking about them. Any occupant of a bureaucracy—church, commercial, legal, academic—knows what a true mess it is, filled with confusions about the very rules its agents are charged to uphold and held captive to micro-dramas about desk placement and what Amanda Lucia describes as the “haptic logics” of physical movements between hierarchized individuals.1 Which is only to say that it seems likely to this reviewer that, internal to the church, there may have been contestation and personal equivocation, even abruption, in the development of a smoothed sexual profile for modern Mormons, but Tabernacles of Clay does not record such conflict. We do not hear about who might be pulling on the leaders or what social realities specifically influenced their thinking. This is a discursive history of institutional activity. A lot of words, and a lot of campaigns about words, referring to people figured as dangerous to keep other words on the up and up (or straight and narrow).What I am trying to convey is that this is a study of gender and sex that has none of either. This seems like an absence that would very much please the LDS Church and its leaders. But I wondered how Petrey thought about sex and gender himself as he worked through these archives of gender recommendation and sexual assignment.Speaking for myself, I am not unique among my dyke brethren in possessing a rather chatty and very scrutinizing relationship to sex lives and gendered practices. Because I am fearful I will be sniffed out and wounded for my own, I try to beat the speaker at their game and think about the subtext they are smothering as prep for possible attack. But this is me. When I read that by the late 1950s, church leaders “increasingly worried that homosexuality was a growing problem in need of a solution,” I wonder about why they started to worry; about who were their friends, or children of friends, or rumor-mongers about friends, that made this growth apparent (64). To be clear, I do not assume there was a lot of secret sex happening that the church would call “homosexual.” I assume calling someone a “homo” in the 1950s was an effective way to ruin someone's life, and there are one hundred reasons people might want to ruin someone's life that have nothing to do with the sex they are, or are not, having. Especially in a labyrinthine fraternity of men competing to get the right girl or win a game on the basketball court or just win friends and influence people, intimating someone was queer may have been a helpful strategic weapon to neutralize another contestant.Petrey does not toy in such speculative thinking. He mentions that in 1959, the best-selling (and Pulitzer Prize–winning) book Advise and Consent depicted a Mormon US senator as a clandestine homosexual, but he does not make much of that fiction or how, generally, Mormon men were perceived in the mid-twentieth-century US. Instead, Tabernacles of Clay describes the argumentative, therapeutic, and political efforts Mormons made in the fields of gender when they began to so worry about sex. This leaves the queer reader with a powerful pummeling experience of the church's activism against them, and indeed almost any minority community the church can surveil. I use the word “pummeling” intentionally. Despite having read a great many histories of sexuality in the US, rarely have I read one that records so much vitriol for gay people. Despite having worked within multiple homophobic bureaucracies, I still found myself worn thin. What does a reader learn by reminding herself how repugnant a church finds her to be?I learned other things from the historical journey, certainly. Because of Petrey's work, I have learned anew that Latter-day Saint leadership wholeheartedly endorsed racial segregation. Joseph Fielding Smith, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught that “the modern prohibition on interracial marriage had its basis in biblical narrative and Mormonism's revealed doctrine” (25). To be clear, Mormon leaders were not sweating if non-White races mixed up. As college president Owen J. Cook explained: “The Brethren were not concerned if a Tongan married a Maori or a Samoan married a Hawaiian. . . . Those types of marriages did not concern the Brethren, but the Caucasian did” (29). Policing White people from having sex, or just going to school, with Black people is something the church only slowly ceased to do. Utah was, in 1963, the second to last state in the West to overturn the state's anti-miscegenation statute. When the 1978 revelation about Black priesthood occurred, many Mormons observed it “flatly contradicted past authoritative teachings on racial purity and lacked convincing precedent” (48). Petrey makes clear: they are correct.For Petrey, the point is not to tell a history of Mormonism and race but to trace how race informed sexual options in modern Mormonism. The main thrust of the book's remaining chapters tracks how much Mormon discourse wanted certain kinds of women and men and worried the church could not get them without a lot of instruction. After World War II, Mormon leaders agreed with broader national calls by conservatives for a new American home founded on male hierarchy. Women were told to exercise, avoid swearing, be mindful of their looks, and develop a “pleasing personality.” In a striking understatement, Petrey observes, “In emphasizing women's work as homemaking and their duties to please their husbands, these curricular changes designated an increasingly narrow scope of women's place in society and the church” (39).Men did not evade scrutiny, as fears of homosexuality drove men to double down on their masculine assurance and performance of sturdy professionalism. “Delinquent male leadership and sexual deviance were inextricably linked,” suggesting that if you stumbled in your church duties you could get a squinting suspicion that your lost ward paperwork might mean you had developed an inappropriate desire (53). Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth President of the church, was especially devoted to rooting out homosexuality and argued that masculine self-mastery could be trained. It must be trained because, as Kimball explained in The Miracle of Forgiveness, same-sex relationships were “revolting,” “detestable,” “ugly,” and “repugnant” (70). Here the relationship between sexuality and gender is on full display. Apostle Boyd K. Packer conveys here what Petrey argues is the general Latter-day Saint view, namely that everybody is at risk of being homosexual, and the Mormon response to this fungibility is to keep an eye on the gender-mastery prize. “You must protect yourself,” Packer said. “No one is locked into that kind of life . . . There is no mismatching of bodies and spirits. Boys are to become men—masculine, manly men—ultimately to become husbands and fathers. No one is predestined to a perverted use of these powers” (88). Mormon psychologists propagated a therapeutic belief in a “true, inner heterogender.” Deviations from this heterogender were pathological missteps. Correcting gender performances was the key to unlocking the “true” interior gender (96). Mixed-sex marriage was the primary practice that would ensure the acquisition of a “heterogender.” In 1962 BYU decided not to admit any student who they had “convincing evidence is a homosexual” (64). “Homosexuality” was formally added to the list of excommunicable offenses in the LDS Church in 1968.In the 1970s and 1980s, Mormon treatment of homosexuality presupposed that it was best understood as a failure of a proper understanding of gender norms, that heterosexuality was the “normal” condition of human beings, and that homosexuality was a deviation from that norm. Petrey describes how the LDS Church never simply opposed homosexuality or gender nonconformity. Rather, it used these deviations to reiterate the right relations it hoped people would practice. So, the church simultaneously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment—as Rodney Turner wrote in his 1972 book Woman and the Priesthood, “No woman can fully identify with the work-a-day world of men and escape unmarked”—and advanced a more egalitarian doctrine of marriage (111). Petrey reflects what decades of Mormon studies scholarship has assessed: “Mormons did not simply reject social change but accommodated and adapted to it” (137).Getting Mormon wives a more equal say in their marriages required cutting queer people further down to size. “Heterosexuality ascended over patriarchy as the defining Mormon doctrine of marriage and family,” Petrey writes (139). When, in the 1990s, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex marriages amounted to sex discrimination, the LDS Church heard that ruling as an ecumenical mating call. It scrambled to develop alliances with Catholic and evangelical grassroots organizations to get state amendments passed that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. Senior apostle Boyd K. Packer understood the battle against homosexuality to be a battle for the future of the church and its children. He diagnosed homosexuality as an insidious practice, comparing homosexual intercourse as a crime equal to incest and “the molesting of little children of either gender” (157). Church leaders introduced new doctrines that made same-sex sexual intimacy one of the most serious sins for Latter-day Saint leaders. Tabernacles of Clay proves indisputably that the central political drama of twentieth-century religious organizations was not their relationship to the state but to their idea of right gender expression.Petrey does not just want to describe all the “areas of activity” in which the church operated to manage gender. He also wants to explain those activities. This is how the language of queer, and specifically “queer theorists,” enters a book that otherwise reads as handbook to homophobic politics. For Petrey, turning to queer theorists allows him to account for the elements of “fluidity and malleability” he sees as preponderant in church writings about gender (15). “Mormons did not adopt notions of sexual essentialism or a ‘two-sex’ ontology,” Petrey summarizes, “but advocated an ontology of malleability and fluidity to explain the world as they experienced it” (222). Mormon leaders developed a theory about sexuality that competed with emerging popular bimodal accounts of gender essentialism. “Mormonism resisted and subverted the notions of the essential sexual subject and relied on a model of asexual difference that held that the barrier between male and female was fragile and permeable” (223). In that difference, Latter-day Saint gender theorizing seems, to Petrey, kin with things queer theorists espouse.The revelation of this research, for Petrey, is that in Mormon writings, “there is no ‘being’ to gender, only its ‘becoming’ through regulated norms” (222). Petrey points to the writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, who argued that “the primal element of human beings was essentially ungendered.” Fielding Smith developed a soteriology in which being without gender was to “occupy a lower state of existence” (45). Practicing Mormonism, therefore, meant practicing gender. Petrey's excitement about this interpretive strand is palpable. “Whether in the Proclamation [on the Family] or other preaching, when the church leaders appealed to nature and essentialism,” he asserts, “they were making normative claims about what ought to be, not descriptive claims about an ontology of sexual difference” (140). Petrey sees in twentieth-century Mormon thought about gender a striking commitment to gender as “open to vulnerability and change” (209). As he writes: In the traditional history of sexuality, heterosexuality and homosexuality jointly emerged as fixed identities in modernity. Queer theorists have objected to this modernist characterization of sexuality, historicizing and relativizing these categories and embracing fluidity, ambiguity, and performativity instead. But Mormonism does not fit neatly into this traditional history of sexuality. Instead, Mormon leaders also sought for relativity, ambiguity, and especially malleability to explain the fragility of heterosexual desires. The prescribed cure for gender failure was to perform heterosexuality and heteronormative gender roles. (103)There is much to be said about this passage, but what is most important to underline is that I could feel, really feel, Petrey's enthusiasm in these moments. He has figured something out that for him is also the way out of Mormon homophobia. Yes, “homosexuality became the ultimate threat of gender fluidity and its most prevalent expression” (52). But also “gender fluidity was not something to be avoided entirely but something that could be strategically harnessed” (55). That it was, in Mormonism, normally harnessed to heal the homo and make sure mom was always pleasing is the headline. But the internal logics of gender theorizing, for Petrey, make Mormonism more mutable than fixed.The latter is not something Petrey ever precisely says, but I take it to be the source of his queer theory glee. At least, that is what explains to me why something so widely known in the study of religion—namely, religions develop gendered practices; those practices usually presuppose gender is not fixed but performed—can be so thrilling to behold. “I am arguing that the concept of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to dominate the structure of Mormon teachings about gender and sexuality in the period since World War II—eventually eclipsing racial and patriarchal teachings—I also want to underscore the dramatic changes that these categories have themselves undergone,” Petrey writes (216). He wants to underscore these dramatic changes because it shows that those Mormon performances of gender that may seem stable or fixed have, in his words, “actually been open to dramatic changes. Latter-day Saint teachings about marriage, gender roles, sexual difference, and sexuality have undergone remarkable transformation since World War II. The teachings and practices of the LDS Church in the early twenty-first century would already be unrecognizable to Mormon leaders in the mid-twentieth century” (213). Petrey and I could reasonably debate his repeated use of “dramatic change” to describe a church that still, as of this writing, does not allow trans people temple access and that hopes homosexuality will be healed in the next life (and certainly does not want it among the First Presidency in this one). I can cede dramatic change transpired if Petrey cedes that dragooning queer theory into the causal explanation is a bit, well, opportunistic.Of relevance here is not precisely the intellectual facts of gender, queer, and feminist theory but the reason for their appearance in a book on twentieth-century Mormon gender politics that makes no pretense of being interested in queer people or queering the non-queers that form its documentary focus.2 Again, I think Petrey's intention is to employ queer theorizing as the intellectual grounds to describe “gender and sexuality as persistently marked by ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction, and paradox” (223). But this is like saying the word totalitarian describes an authority that is controlling. It is true, but that does not nearly capture its right usage's bite. “‘Queer,’ if useful, stands for those against whom dominant social understandings of the normative develop,” writes Linn Tonstad.3 There is no doubt that queer theorists have had reason to doubt whether this word can retain its power to stand against. As Sharon Marcus observed in 2005: Queer has been the victim of its own popularity, proliferating to the point of uselessness as a neologism for the transgression of any norm (queering history, or queering the sonnet). Used in this sense, the term becomes confusing, since it always a homosexuality that may not be at when the term is used so also to the multiple that sexual practice, sexual and sexual to up That an important about the of sexuality, but it also describes a state experienced by is queer, no one this is the point queer theorists want to the by the of queer also its the of queer also its The I could observe is that Tabernacles of Clay to this The more I could say is that it a to for the very the book's central to must do more than call to theory is has must work to call to the of a theory that can feminist that theory which to further feminist to and and theory that can be and is in as as written As I on Tabernacles of Clay and its of queer, I thought about my record of around is how, early in my writings on I on the term without a for its history in the When I the especially I the I that I used in to something I and also to seem like I something other people did are the the the with work of is than the work of I have no doubt Petrey thought it was a to queer theory and even to queers that he his in with them. But what need is not We need to the that seems ever to a new to Tabernacles of Clay does not We are not to think about the LDS Church the twentieth century, are taught what might its around new of gendered The reader that Mormons gender is but this no more to its most fragile than that the White men in will when and queer, will be When a of a Apostle if the church would her for that and I think need to that have been with and for being with the unique of the is something have not had so much experience and have in teaching on Tabernacles of Clay at the dramatic changes the LDS Church has a trans person in or in or in with no to what will their church as it makes their