Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism(s) (feat. Brenda Weber & Kathleen Flake)

Professor Brenda Weber of Indiana University-Bloomington joins me and Professor Kathleen Flake to discuss how representations of Latter-day Saints have been used in American media for a variety of purposes. 

Transcript

Gender, Sexuality, & Mediated Mormonism(s)

[00:00:00] Stephen Betts: I'm joined today by my co-host Dr. Kathleen Flake and our guest, Dr. Brenda Weber, Dr. Weber is Provost Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her work engages "identity as discursively gendered, constructed, and embodied through written and mediated means as well as how gender sex, sexuality, race, and class work together to inform notions of the normative self." Her main research themes include celebrity, masculinity, and American religious culture. We're chatting today about Dr. Weber's most recent book, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism. Thanks for being here today, Brenda. 

[00:00:38] Brenda Weber: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:40] Stephen Betts: So Brenda, to start off here, I think it would be helpful to orient our listeners who are more familiar with the disciplinary idioms of history and, and religious studies to your disciplinary idioms. You work in gender studies and media studies and I guess I, I want to ask as a gender studies and media studies scholar what kinds of questions do you bring to your work? And what kinds of, theoretical tools are in your toolbox? 

[00:01:04] Brenda Weber: Thank you. That's a great place to start. My disciplinary training is actually in literature. I was an Anglo-American Victorianist thinking about the 19th century in both the UK and the US. Which is actually a great place to start when you're thinking about Mormonism, right? Because of the moment when the church is born and when I came to Indiana, it was my skills as a gender researcher and gender scholar that took me in a new direction, into popular culture and media culture. And, and so most of my published books have been about reality television and, you know, film more broadly. And so, I've found increasingly, because I'm in an interdisciplinary field and department, I wanna think always very capaciously about media, not just about television or about film or about novels. I'm always interested in how all of those things are working together. And in this book, I had a really, um, amazing opportunity to think not only across different mediated forms from, you know, print to online, to amateur video production, to Sony pictures, uh, you know, feature films. But I could also think across time. So I was looking at 19th century materials and I was looking at things that came out on YouTube yesterday. And I, I loved that kind of temporal fluidity that got built into the project as well. So I guess the, the quick answer is the kind of scholar I am, I'm looking for how lots of different archival reservoirs, are giving us information when looked at together rather than scholars have a tendency to separate, which we have to do in order to be able to say, well, here's what I can tell you about poetry in 1870. Right, but for me, it's always about what happens if I keep throwing more things in there. What kinds of new questions do I have to ask myself? What kinds of new observations open up to me? Because I'm not limiting how I think about my archive or even really about my method. At one point, I had a lot of questions from friends and colleagues saying, well, you're gonna be interviewing people, right. Because you know, there are real Mormons in the world. And, and, and then oddly, I started getting phone numbers for like Donny Osmond. Someone gave me Donny Osmond's phone number and I like, I don't really wanna interview Donny Osmond. And I had to think hard about why I didn't want to. A very good friend of mine is married to Steve Young. There was another sort. I could talk to somebody and really get some interesting ideas, particularly about celebrity in the contemporary moment. But I realized I was much more interested in how, how these media, archives and artifacts were stimulating ideas and how those cultural ideas had a kind of momentum. And that that was a different kind of project than asking people about their own experiences. So what I would do is look at interviews that Donny Osmond or Marie Osmond or any of the Osmonds were in. And I went to a concert that Jimmy Osmond did down the road. And I read Steve Young's autobiography, but I wasn't interested in actually talking to people because I, I needed to make real clear that if I was gonna have boundaries, it was around the circulation of the ideas and that I, those ideas always needed to come to me through some level of mediation.

[00:04:54] Stephen Betts: Yeah, I think, of course the concept of mediation is very important. And, and we'll talk about that, in, in just a few minutes, I just had a follow up question for, for what you just said, which is, you were kind of mentioning the reasons why you didn't want to talk to, to people in a kind of ethnographic way, as a kind of, of boundary for delineating, you know, what kinds of mediation you want to look at. My question is if your, if your research scope, your inquiry is so capacious and just in terms of just embracing anything, that's like, you know, mediated through some sort of technology, where do you stop? 

[00:05:29] Brenda Weber: I think that's an excellent question. And if you've looked at my bibliography, you know, I didn't have a good answer, but that, I, I think you stop when you start seeing enough repetition of tropes and ideas that you feel you're honestly representing, a kind of accurate sense of the cultural work being performed by those forms of mediation. And sometimes you see those ideas coming from lots of different contexts. Like you might, you know, the, the book is organized, not by media type, but by larger tropes, say around, what they say on sister wives is progressive polygamy, which is different from a different, older fundamentalist way of imagining and enacting polygamy.

[00:06:18] And, it was really intriguing to me then to start seeing which texts were speaking to which text, right? That it wasn't all reality TV speaks to itself and all film speaks to itself and all YouTube videos speak to themselves that it was that there were these thematics that were being worked through in very different places, sometimes aware of each other, sometimes not. And, and by opening up at that level, in terms of which of these archival materials could influence my thinking. Then it helped me kinda get to new sorts of conclusions than I would've been had I been beholden to a specific type of media. 

[00:07:01] Stephen Betts: I'm wondering before we sort of get into mediated Mormonism itself, what in this approach to studying mediation and mediated culture, what does that toolbox bring to the study of religion generally in your mind and more particularly, how does it help illuminate what you lay out pretty, pretty extensively in the book as your personal experience of Mormonism, and, and how that sort of helped form the, the idea of the book.

[00:07:29] Brenda Weber: I don't know if I can answer the first question. I'm not a religious studies scholar. Kathleen might have a better take on that question than I would. I think it's a baffling book to a religious studies scholar to be perfectly honest because it doesn't engage with a religion the way most religious studies scholars do. I hope what it can do is help pluralize how we think about bodies in real life and sort of bodies as imagined. And, and the best example that I could give of that actually is my first book, which was on makeover television. And I was looking at reality TV and I was looking at these processes of makeover shows. Very much like this one I didn't want, I did, I did contain it to reality TV, but I didn't want to only look at say plastic surgery shows because I could have easily said, okay, I'm gonna look out five different plastic surgery shows and maybe Nip/Tuck as a sort of contrast case and be in and out and done. It would've been pretty tidy and pretty easy to do. But I thought that doesn't really get at what's interesting to me about this. With the makeover shows whether you were looking at bodies or faces or wardrobes or your personal finances or your kids or your car or your restaurant. I mean, there were, there were so many shows that were happening right after 2001 that were about fantasies of transformation. And I, I remember when I was writing manuscripts and also sending out some, separate articles, readers reports were really baffled. The editors wouldn't know who to send to this often happens for an interdisciplinary scholar. So they'd go to sociologists of the body and then they'd go to a reality TV person or something like that. And the sociologists of the body would say, well, why aren't you quoting, more scholars who work on plastic surgery and I'm thinking, well, cause I'm not really talking about plastic surgery. I'm talking about, it's mediation, right? It's a similar kind of thing is what was happening in this book. But then I realized, that was a too easy simplification that I was making on my own part, that I couldn't discount the fact that these are real people. And that these were real stories and real bodies. And it, it really forced me into having to become much broader in terms of what I thought about as my responsible secondary literature that I really needed to be talking very specifically to sociologists and medical ethnography and that kind of thing. So in this case, same thing, right. I have to be engaged with scholarship around religious studies and around Mormon studies. And I learned a lot from that, but I don't think of that as my primary contribution. And then just about my own experience. I had to really, there's a 40 page memoir in the back of the book. And I had to really fight to keep that in the book. It, it baffled people's well, again, external readers. It, it felt, it seemed from the feedback I was getting that it, it didn't seem like a, a scholar should be talking about their own experience, but for me, first of all, I'm a full professor. So, you know, you can take some risks that you can't take when you're younger in the profession, but it felt like there would be no book if it weren't for that memoir. And for me, memoir was another kind of scrim, another kind of mediation that was affecting how I was working my way through these materials. And I didn't want to have a pre, uh, I was gonna say pretense, but I didn't wanna have this sort of front that said, well, here I'm the scholar. And I'm gonna tell you what all this means. I wanted people to know, look, I'm already from the outset incapable of offering you some sort of objective point of view on this, because my own experience vis-a-vie Mormonism is so deeply saturated with how these things make sense to me that it's always going to be filtered through this other form of mediation. And for me, that makes it more interesting for others. Maybe it makes it sort of bankrupt as a academic text. I, I don't know. It's always, it's like the appeal of the unreliable narrator, right? That's it's it makes it more interesting to me. I mean, what was interesting to me is how many people, as I was writing this book over about a five year period, had their own version of my story. And particularly those of us who were raised in the west, and I talk about two really dear friends in the acknowledgements to the book who were sort of with me at, from the beginning and kind of talking with ideas and we've been chatting about these things since, you know, we were in junior high and that it did feel like a sort of invisible presence that you couldn't quite account for. And so. Part of the writing of the book was to, I, I think of it like the CSI, you know, shows where they're spraying, a dust in the air and then you can see the trajectory of the bullets and all these. So it was just somehow trying to see these shapes that you couldn't otherwise detect. 

[00:12:59] Kathleen Flake: So, Brenda, would you say that I imagine, for instance, asking you, is there a place in this book where the understanding of Mormonism is not mediated by that experience? 

[00:13:12] Brenda Weber: No 

[00:13:12] Kathleen Flake: Because, and, and I think, and I thought, well, no, you would, you would say no that the book wouldn't exist with that without that experience, that it is a self-reflection as much as it is anything else. So a seeking to understand your own experience in the course of doing this research, 

[00:13:29] Brenda Weber: Yeah, I, I think too, the writing of the book filled in a lot of questions that I had that I didn't even realize were open questions. So for instance, I, you know, there's a lot, as you both know, within church culture, that's a part of the discourse community of the members of the church. It's not meant for other people outside, but when you're a teenager, you don't really get those distinctions that your friends are talking about. Things that they only can talk about with themselves and not with each other, or, you know, I mentioned in the memoir of seeing my piano teacher outside of the door of the temple wet. And that, that didn't make sense to me. Right. Or why was my neighbor always dressed in white once a month? And it that, 

[00:14:24] Kathleen Flake: And does it and does it make sense to you now and, and how, oh yeah. What is, what is the sense you make of it? You kind of leave them in that account. It's part of a list of things that didn't make sense to you.

[00:14:37] Brenda Weber: Yeah. 

[00:14:37] Kathleen Flake: As you were eight or 10 years old, right, driving by the, the Mesa temple. But you don't really go to the point where it makes new sense to you in light of your disciplinary training. 

[00:14:48] Brenda Weber: Mm. Um, 

[00:14:51] Kathleen Flake: And I missed that in the book. Because as, as, as enlivening narratively as those accounts were, I wanted to be taken to an understanding of this representation, first mediated through this very fascinating youth interaction. What they were hearing, the sense they were making of it. Then as they, you know, it's like the, the campfire, the, the classic whisper something to someone at a a campfire and it keeps going around the circle. I didn't feel like I could break the circle though, to see what the phenomenon was independent of that moment in time. Right. Well, so what's the new sense you make of that. Let's just go back to the piano teacher. She's standing outside the temple. And she's wet and you're trying to make sense of that. What would you make sense of it now, you talk about this book is about looking at categories like religious commitment as justice and narcissism and all of those things. Mm-hmm what's the new sense in the piano teacher or pick another figure that, that the boy that, oh, that, that heart rending. The love story, the Valentine, right. That you wrote to your boy in your class and he just stepped on your heart. 

[00:16:03] Brenda Weber: Yeah. He did didn't he? 

[00:16:07] Kathleen Flake: Right. And you said you can't fire me. I quit. And you tore up the Valentine. It was really, yeah fascinating story. So what, so what does your disciplinary training bring to give you new understanding of those people? 

[00:16:20] Brenda Weber: I mean, partially it's a literal understanding that I have now that I didn't have, then. I now know what they were doing in the temple and I didn't know then, and I know that partially from research and partially from media text. You know, if you, if you wanna know what happens in the temple, you can watch Big Love and you see Barb go through the veil. And, uh, if 

[00:16:45] Kathleen Flake: Right. And I remember that episode, but you don't really understand. In that episode, you know, it means a lot to her, whatever it is, it means a lot to her. 

[00:16:53] Brenda Weber: Yeah. 

[00:16:53] Kathleen Flake: And you hear this fear that drives her to the veil in that episode, right? Yeah. 

[00:16:57] Brenda Weber: I think what's interesting about media culture right now is that if, if you have an interest to find out more, there are a lot of resources that you can get to pretty quickly. So if, if you're watching this, you know, ritual being enacted on Big Love, and you're what is happening here, you can, you know, Google any number of, resources to tell you. Now, one of the things I didn't realize is there are several 19th century memoirs about mm-hmm , um, women leaving the church. And I'm trying to remember wasn't the, um Ann Eliza Young, but there was another, another woman who wrote a pretty famous memoir that came out in a similar time. I quote it in the book and I could find the source. There you go. Fanny Stenhouse thank you. And she actually includes the details of many different ritualized ceremonies that happened within the temple as does Martha Beck in Leaving the Saints. So what I had always thought was this highly guarded secret was actually available to me all the time. So that was also interesting, that kind of literalness of what do these things represent? What do they mean? How do they work? Um, that was all available to me. And yet I, 

[00:18:24] Kathleen Flake: But what do they mean? Let's pause for a moment on that, to know, to know these things, to know that that woman was doing proxy baptisms for the deceased, right. Mm-hmm. You do know a fact, but do you know what it means? And that's what likewise with Fannie Stenhouse and, and the, the broad availability of the Mormon temple rite over time, you can even go on websites that will give you parallel readings of those temple rites as they've evolved over time to, to read that, to know it, we like to think we have we develop an expertise because we're able to articulate, we're able to ourselves mediate what those things mean. Not just replicate them in our books. Right, 

[00:19:08] Brenda Weber: Right. 

[00:19:09] Kathleen Flake: So we don't wanna leave the woman outside the temple all wet, we wanna say, what does it mean now? I'm only using that story as an example not because it is one you should have done that. But generally speaking about the book itself as you're mediating representation of Mormonisms, and you're discovering, for example, Hey, if this thing is a secret, it's one of the worst kept secrets in the world. And secondly, they're part of the people making it available. Both insiders and outsiders are making this available. 

[00:19:35] Brenda Weber: Mm-hmm 

[00:19:36] Kathleen Flake: So what do I do with my argument about Mormonism representing the danger of Mormonism being in its secrecy, in its rites? What do I do with that because that is one of the tropes or the memes of Mormonism that it's dangerous because it has these things we can't all see 

[00:19:51] Brenda Weber: mm-hmm 

[00:19:51] Kathleen Flake: Well, now I know you can see them. So what do I do in my book about the nature of representation? And of secrecy itself. What is the work that secrecy is doing this trope that doesn't seem to be accurate as you say, at a factual level, since it's out there, people can know. 

[00:20:09] Brenda Weber: Well, it is inaccurate now. I think it probably was in the past, but I, before I move on, I wanna ask you, when you say, what does it mean? I'm wondering. For whom who do, who do you mean when you're answering? 

[00:20:22] Kathleen Flake: Well, I accept that question. I, I could say of the book as well. Right? When we talk about representation, we're doing it not so that we can simply describe the representation. Right? Donny and Marie are sitting in the same angles. Mirroring one another. Here. We, we wanna say why that's significant. We wanna say, what is the significance of that? And you would say that as someone with expertise in media, but in, in a religious context, what kind of meaning do you make of the representation if you're not at some level also talking about the meaning of the religion, right? 

[00:20:59] Brenda Weber: Well, again, I'm wondering meaning for whom and significance to whom, right? Because I, what, I'm not 

[00:21:06] Kathleen Flake: Anybody! 

[00:21:07] Brenda Weber: Well, 

[00:21:08] Kathleen Flake: Anybody! To go beyond the descriptive level. And to say, I'm gonna choose two's audiences. I'm gonna talk what it meant to somebody when they were teenagers. And I'm gonna talk to what it means to these people now do at whatever, right. You, you can, you can narrow your audience. I'm not saying you have to say mean to everybody, but significance. Right? What is the significance for why I'm talking about this right now? Yeah, that's what I wanna give my reader isn't it? The significance of the mediation? 

[00:21:35] Brenda Weber: Well, what I was trying to help my reader understand is that there's a proliferation of representational possibilities about Mormonism in that the, the reference point is doing something specific that's bigger than the church itself, that it's not 

[00:21:55] Kathleen Flake: absolutely 

[00:21:56] Brenda Weber: reflect back onto the church and tell you more about who are these people and what is this faith system and, and what do they believe, but it's really a reflection or a meditation if you wanna call it that, or as kind of compulsive obsession on how do we understand gender and sexuality, and why are these the figures that are often called upon to convey this information about gender and sexuality? So in that particular moment, where thank you for reading the book so carefully. Where you're talking about me describing the interview of Donny and Marie with Barbara Walters. And, you know, that they're dressed alike, that they're, they have the same bodily deportment but there's, there's such fascinating kind of gender information that's happening in that interview. Barbara Walters is pushing them both it's right before 1978, when the church changes its stance on black people in the church or priesthood holders and the Osmonds are trying very hard not to in any way question, the authority of their church. And yet they're also with respect to each other kind of playing these gender codes. So, Barbara asked Marie, you know, within your church women aren't allowed to have a say and Marie's quite outspoken. And yet she basically at that point in her life, kind of throws it back over to Donny, to speak for both of them. And I felt that that was a really telling moment about not just about gender, but about mediated gender and why these two figures who represent a church, which at this point is kind of saturated with meanings about modesty and kind of, you know, we're as American as American can be, that there's a respect for parents and elders and a, a goodness and a righteousness about the, the faith and that, that they become these model representatives of these larger values. So that's, that's a huge part of the meaning that I'm hoping people can see is it's not just that one version of gender that you keep getting you, you get this full spectrum, particularly around sexuality. You know, Mormons get called upon to represent chasteness and virginity and a kind of rampant, lustful sexuality. And it's all somehow absorbed under the meme of Mormon. 

[00:24:34] Stephen Betts: So I'm wondering if I can ask a couple of follow up questions to that. The first is, it seems to me that in the book, you're arguing that what Mormonism basically set out to do basically becoming more American in the early 20th century and embodying a certain kind of American identity that most people would recognize by the mid to, to late 20th century, that they had really achieved that fully you're saying it seems that that identity that they take on consciously becomes the kind of overdetermined identity accidentally where they don't just become American. They now become so American in a certain way. And so representative of what they think that they are identifying with things like, you know, the, the post World War II, nuclear family, and, and, you know, traditional gender norms and those kinds of things, that their labor in their identity work in creating that takes on a life of its own. Is that, am I reading that correctly?

[00:25:38] Brenda Weber: I wouldn't say that was a deliberate part of my argument. I feels more like Religion of a Different Color, that book, which I think is a, a super phenomenal book. I feel like that that nicely encapsulates his argument. What you've just said, I, I think in, in my case, that's an element, the, the notion of Americanness and how, how much motility is there when we're thinking about what constitutes the American idea,, but it seemed to me, and now this is part of my own bias because I'm a gender scholar, but I was really wanting to understand the resonances around gender and sexuality. And sometimes yes, that reinforces notions of Americanness, but sometimes it deviated from there. 

[00:26:37] Kathleen Flake: Yeah, I think this is where we have to be historians a little bit and say all of this is in flux, right? 

[00:26:43] Brenda Weber: Well, yeah. 

[00:26:44] Kathleen Flake: So the Donny and Marie's sexuality is, is going to come to stand for something very different in the 1980s and nineties than it stood for. When would, when did they have that show where they dressed alike? What, what show was that? Was that in the seventies? Was it that long ago? Long show. Yeah. Yeah. So. What I hear here is, at least what triggers in my mind of what Stephen says, at what point does the representation of Mormonism flip so that in the 1950s, they represent patriotism, the nuclear family, they represent, you know, all of that stuff. And then as America changes, this is Peter Coviello's argument that, yeah. You know, what do you do? What do you do when you've done your best to keep the rules? And then the rules change. So your book comes in and at an interesting point, and because it is so interestingly biographical, right? So that you are this, you are writing about the seventies and eighties and your personal journey, as it carries over through those changes and the ones to come, and you're analyzing the values that are represented Mormonism as a means of representing certain values, is that fair? Values about gender, values about race, but also the other way around where, where values, if you wanna give them agency use Mormonism for their own purposes. Right. So you're doing both. You're, you're analyzing those things within Mormonism, but I thought principally the book is about how media then takes this phenomenon. However you wanna define it and begins to deploy it to represent other things. The conversation that I understand you saying is helpful to help, to help us understand justice, religious commitment, fundamentalism you have that list in your prologue. So, so the object here is, is really twofold. On the one hand, you know, a deeply personal engagement with Mormonism in this particular late 20th century era, then seeing how media in the present day is deploying Mormonism as a way to talk about these broader cultural themes, which you say are useful because Mormonism provides a contrast. In a way it's almost the thing we don't wanna be now.

[00:28:58] Brenda Weber: Hmm. 

[00:28:59] Kathleen Flake: Right. We wanna be something besides, we don't wanna be this. 

[00:29:03] Brenda Weber: I don't know that I'd agree that we don't wanna be this. So I think about the South Park episode, you know,

[00:29:11] Kathleen Flake: mm-hmm oh, yes, yes. 

[00:29:12] Brenda Weber: You know, it kind of tells the whole origination story and 

[00:29:15] Kathleen Flake: yeah, we may be crazy, but at least our families work right. That's end of the episode, 

[00:29:19] Brenda Weber: I think that South Park and then The Book of Mormon on Broadway, it, it wants to make fun of the origination story and, you know, pulling the tablets out of the hat and, or it's I'm oversimplifying. But it also really appreciates it. And the, the child on at South Park loves going to Family Home Evening and, and appreciates the coherency of the family model. And so I don't think it's so much that media is saying, these are people we don't wanna be it's, but it's, it's fascinated by what it, it understands that media is. And I understand that it's hard to typify media as having, uh, a kind of point of view, which is what I'm doing right here. But going back to your earlier question, when did this all change, you know, much different scholars and perhaps better scholars than I have talked about, you know, that moment in the fifties and Correlation and how did that then create this new template for building the modern Mormon church. So what, one of the things that I was trying to think about is how does the change in media that's happened over the last 20 years, right? How has that grabbed hold of Mormonism to do something that, that may not have anything at all to do with Mormons? And what I mean, when I say how media has changed, right? Is that we're all kinda living in this hyper mediated moment where, we have a sense of who we are and what we look like and that we can go viral. And so through social media, through, even the kind of post network moment where we have cable and we have, you know, now we can stream and we can do podcasts, right? So there are all of these forms of media that in some ways have democratized media, that more people like us in this very moment can create media that could be circulated without having to have a million dollar budget. And, the kind of armature of Warner Brothers studios. So we can get ideas into the, the marketplace much faster. And I, I mean that marketplace of ideas, not just a financial sort of space, but it also kind of flattens some of those ideas because there's just so much out there. And it was intriguing to me from the very beginning of doing research on this project, that every little nook and cranny I looked at in the mediascape had Mormonism in it. 

[00:32:06] Kathleen Flake: Yeah. I think, I think the outsized role of Mormonism 

[00:32:10] Brenda Weber: mm-hmm 

[00:32:11] Kathleen Flake: in media is one of the best stories for someone to tell over time. Not, not just now, but certainly now, right. The outsized role. Why does this thing get so much leverage yeah. In their cultural conversation. Right. So what's your answer to that?

[00:32:30] Brenda Weber: Well, I mean, in some ways it depends on what you're looking at. So a text, like, Big Love, for instance, we know that the creators chose a non-normative family because they wanted to tell a parallel story about same sex marriage and they did it through a polygamous Mormon family. And I think in a broader conversation about marriage rights and about LGBTQ rights, that Mormonism whether right or wrong has come to play this role as another, fringe identity or at least part of it could be perceived as fringe and working through what does it mean to be on the outside? What does it mean to feel on the edge? I mean, those are the themes that are just straight through a reality show like Sister Wives, for instance, 

[00:33:26] Kathleen Flake: So the work, the work that the media's doing, the what is, seems to me, one of the, the major question of your book, right aside from the, the social locating of yourself in relation to your subject. The, the other thing the book is doing is asking what work does Mormonism do for media today or rather, how is media using Mormonism to do what kind of cultural work? What kind of questions are they using Mormonism for as an object? Not as an end in itself, but in order to understand what's going on our culture more broadly 

[00:34:06] Brenda Weber: Or another way I might put that is what is it that media believes Mormonism signifies and in referencing it such creates that meaning, right? So there's a kind of circularity to what's happening. 

[00:34:22] Kathleen Flake: So they're not only interpreting, their constructing. They're part of the discourse. There is, there is a discourse out there that Mormonism is useful for. 

[00:34:32] Brenda Weber: Yeah. Unfortunately, discourse though makes it sound like it's very coherent and it's not, 

[00:34:37] Kathleen Flake: so yeah, there are discourse, there are multiple discourse out there on gender and race.

[00:34:42] Brenda Weber: Yeah. 

[00:34:43] Kathleen Flake: And that's part of 

[00:34:44] Brenda Weber: I'm quibbling with discourse. Cause it 

[00:34:46] Kathleen Flake: That is part of the curiosity here. Why is Mormonism so useful to all these different discourse or are they, are the discourse that different, but regardless. What is the discourse that Mormonism is so useful for, or the discourses? What is the object of the discourse that finds Mormonism so useful to make its point with?

[00:35:07] Brenda Weber: Yeah, and I don't have an easy answer for that because, you know, media, as we know, is, is huge. It's disparate, it's moving in lots of different directions in different times. It doesn't always have a coherent ideology connected to it. But at the very end of the book, I think the conclusion, I know, I mean it, as a conclusion, I can't remember exactly where it's placed. I talk about this 15 second scene in a show called The Catch. It's a Shonda Rhimes show that was on ABC and the show is completely not about Mormons at all. It's, you know a detective who falls in love with a conman and, true to Shonda Rhimes who's fascinated with love in the workplace, through Grey's Anatomy and things like that. It's trying to work through all of the complications for the detective and the, the conman, but there's a moment. Sort of cast as a throwaway moment where, one of the secondary characters we've been getting all this diegetic information that suggests he has this very, capacious non-normative sex life. And so we see him in a moment that's, that's clearly meant to be post-coital, he's sitting on a, a couch in a bathrobe with a woman that we know has been a love interest for him. And then suddenly all of these people start coming out of a bedroom. And one is a black woman in a, a paramedics EMT uniform. And, you know, she says, thanks for the great time. And she leaves and then two men come out of the same room in the white shirt and the black pants with the little badge on and they hand the man a book. And then one of the men kisses the man and one of the men kisses the woman, and then they leave. And, the character says, thanks for the book boys and throws it over his shoulder and that's it. And I thought what did I just see? Right. 

[00:37:09] Kathleen Flake: What did you just see? What did you just see? Cause that's what you do, right? You analyze media representation. Yeah. Yeah. So what, that, that is an intentional script writing, right, endeavor. 

[00:37:20] Brenda Weber: I mean, I really, I had to go back and watch it and rewatch it and think have I, if I been filtering all of my media, engagement with Mormonism for such a long time that I'm seeing it where it's not intended, but it was clearly intended. And yet it was never explained. And I thought, okay, so this is clearly meant to be two Mormon missionary men who come out of this room and that, that, you know, they're, they've been involved in an orgy and that it can be both gay and straight and everything in between. And and that it sort of plays as humor.

[00:37:54] Kathleen Flake: It also plays as titillation. Right. And so we also, we have to recognize the meme of the deflowering of the virgin. Right. Or the struggle to remain virginal, which is a constant trope. And in, yeah, I don't know if I Mormonism right. That particular's particularly, entertainment's designed to be titillating kind of porn or soft porn as we see more commonly on mainstream television can easily use Mormon figures for that trope, for the titillation. Yes. What's the cultural conversation it participates in beyond titillation. That would be my question about the, the Shonda Rhimes scene. Is there anything there besides titillation? 

[00:38:34] Brenda Weber: See that I don't, I there's plenty of titillation. Believe me in the sort of broader mediascape around Mormonism. I I'm not even sure I would consider this scene titillating as much as it is provocative. Like what? And that's because it's, it's post coital, it's not leading up to, and we also don't know if these are actors pretending to be missionaries or if they're actual missionaries. Right. We don't know anything 'cause they don't explain it. And, and so for me it was more. How does a, how does a private joke that gets mediated on network TV work, right? Who, how many people have the receptors to understand what it is they just saw and to filter that through all of these perceptions of what we understand the Mormon missionary to mean, including everything that you're talking about in terms of the, the virginal representation. There's lots and lots and lots of material that you're speaking to, including a show like Twilight, right? That's that's wanting to play around with that tempting of virginity, the virginal pair of Mormon missionaries who are going through the world who be, who become tropes in gay porn pretty quickly. And I think there's a different kind of work happening around that. So for me, what was interesting about that moment is it seemed to be a wink at the audience like, oh, you know what we're talking about without having to explain it. And whenever that happens, I always take a breath as a scholar and say, wait a minute, how is it that that seems to have resonance and meaning without requiring any kind of explicative context? 

[00:40:22] Kathleen Flake: Well, I think, I think your observation moment ago is very helpful where you say this is not merely a representational discourse. It is a discourse discourse. They, you wink because maybe you can't spell it out because it's not yet culturally permissible to spell it out. So we're gonna make this a joke. And we all know that humor has many, many more and darker uses than simply amusement. And so that may be what's going on in that representation. And I think your book shows the variety of representations that are going on about Mormonism, and it's a fruitful enough book that there could be another one, Brenda, if you wanted to write it, I think that's where our conversation shows today. But we thank you for being in this conversation. It's really good of you to, make use of your time, this way with us and put up with us and the way this is so conversational, 

[00:41:13] Brenda Weber: My gosh, hardly putting up. It's an honor to have someone engage with my work. 

[00:41:19] Kathleen Flake: Well, we deeply engaged it. So thank you. 

[00:41:24] Stephen Betts: That's Dr. Brenda Weber. We've been chatting about her book, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism, which is published by Duke University Press. Thanks for chatting with us today, Brenda. 

[00:41:34] Brenda Weber: Thanks for having me.