Show Sidebar Log in
  • Home
  • About Us
    • News
    • Admin
  • Journal
    • About JFSR
    • People
    • Features
    • Volumes
    • Subscriptions
    • Submissions
    • Advertising
  • Blog
    • About the FSR Blog
    • People
    • Submissions
    • @theTable
    • Open Calls
  • Books
    • All Titles
    • About FSR Books
    • FSR Bookstore
  • LAB
    • About LAB
    • People
    • Feminists Talk Religion Podcast
  • Across Generations
    • Description
    • Process
    • Video Projects
  • Donate
  • Conferences
  • Awards

From Testimony to Seximony, from Script to Scripture: Revealing Mormon Women’s Sexuality through the Mormon Vagina Monologues

Volume 27 Number 2
Author(s):
Jill Peterfeso
Abstract:

In 2001, a group of Mormon women scripted and performed the Mormon Vagina Monologues and presented their monologues at the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah. Using the Mormon rhetorical mode of performed testimony, the monologists critiqued the facets of their patriarchal church that prohibit women from speaking publicly about sex and sexual experiences; simultaneously, the Monologues created a “sacred space” in which those testimonies—or seximonies—were valid and celebrated. This article argues that the Mormon Vagina Monologues captured the concept of the “utopian performative,” a category within performance studies that describes work filled with promise, potential, and possibility. A number of monologues are examined here, divided into two groups: first, the voices of heterosexual women trying to navigate patriarchal authority while seeking sexual self-expression, and second, the voices of lesbian and transsexual male-to-female Latter-day Saints striving for acceptance and the right to enjoy intimate relationship.

DOI: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.27.2.31

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.27.2.31

 

Back to Volume 27, Number 2

Recent Blog Posts

  • Can We Speak? When Speech Has Color: Aphonic Speech and Respectability Politics

    April 27, 2022
  • The FSR Blog is Hiring!

    April 21, 2022
  • “Standing Up To Russian Aggression Really Brings Out His Eyes”: Zelenskyy Thirst-Trapping

    April 18, 2022
  • Dante’s Regressive Body Politics: How Dante Brought an Ableist, Misogynist, and Domineering Hell to Earth

    March 9, 2022
  • Where Have All the Women Gone? (@theTable: “Unorthodox Media”)

    February 18, 2022

Recent JFSR Articles

  • The Tentative Mufassira

    September 29, 2021
  • More Than a Feminist Hobby: Gender as an Analytical Category in Qurʾanic Studies

    September 29, 2021
  • Emotive Energy and Pleasure: Centering Female Figures in Qurʾanic Narratives

    September 29, 2021

@theTable Blog Series

FSR Summer Book Club

Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion

Manthologies

Parenting in the Field

Planetary Solidarity

Transcending Transphobia

Intersecting Islamophobia

Feminism Online

Contact Us

Managing Office: [email protected]

Journal Office: [email protected]

Blog Office: [email protected]

>> More Contacts

Copyright 2015 © Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.
All rights reserved. Direct questions to [email protected]

Login