BRANDEIS SERIES ON GENDER, CULTURE, RELIGION, AND LAW
Series editors: Lisa Fishbayn Joffe and Sylvia Neil
This series focuses on the conflict between womens claims to gender equality and legal norms justified in terms of religious and cultural traditions. It seeks work that develops new theoretical tools for conceptualizing feminist projects for transforming the interpretation and justification of religious law, examines the interaction or application of civil law or remedies to gender issues in a religious context, and engages in analysis of conflicts over gender and culture/religion in a particular religious legal tradition, cultural community, or nation. Created under the auspices of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in conjunction with its Project on Gender, Culture, Religion, and the Law, this series emphasizes cross-cultural and interdisciplinary scholarship concerning Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and other religious traditions.
For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com
Janet Bennion, Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism
Ronit Irshai, Fertility and Jewish Law: Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature
Jan Feldman, Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights
Polygamy
in Primetime
MEDIA, GENDER, AND POLITICS IN MORMON FUNDAMENTALISM
Janet Bennion
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Waltham, Massachusetts
Brandeis University Press
An imprint of University Press of New England
www.upne.com
2012 Brandeis University
All rights reserved
For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com
Portions of this work were previously published in somewhat different form, and are used by permission of the respective publishers:
History, Culture, and Variability of Mormon Schismatic Groups and The Many Faces of Polygamy: An Analysis of the Variabiliy in Modern Mormon Fundamentalism in the Intermountain West, in Modern Polygamy in the United States: Historical, Cultural, and Legal Issues Surrounding the Raid on the FLDS in Texas, edited by Cardell Jacobson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101124 and 163184.
Mormon Women in the 21st Century: A Critical Analysis of ODeas Work, in Revisiting Thomas F. ODeas The Mormons: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Cardell K. Jacobson, John P. Hoffman, and Tim B. Heaton (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 136170.
Evaluating the Effects of Polygamy on Women and Children in Four North American Mormon Fundamentalist Groups (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).
Women of Principle: Female Networking in Contemporary Mormon Polygamy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennion, Janet, 1964
Polygamy in primetime: media, gender, and politics in Mormon fundamentalism / Janet Bennion.
pages cm.(Brandeis series on gender, culture, religion, and law)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61168-262-5 (cloth: alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-61168-263-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-61168-296-0 (ebook)
1. Polygamy. 2. Mormon fundamentalism. 3. Mormon womenSocial conditions. I. Title.
HQ994.B46 2012
306.84230882893dc23 2011049316
Contents
Preface
Jill Mormon Auto ethnography
I sat watching Season 5 of HBOs Big Love with my husband the other night and began shouting at him, waving my arms about.
What is it, my dear? said my ever-calm, non-Mormon life companion.
I squawked that Barb, the first wife of Bill Henrickson, had just demanded the right to hold the priesthood alongside her husband and he had abruptly told her, No way!
So? replied my husband, not realizing that this was the worst thing he could have said to me. How could my Native American hubby understand the heart-wrenching battles I and other liberal Mormon women have fought? How could he understand my efforts to show the full picture of womens lives in Mormonism, as a fringe LDS, feminist anthropologist? Yet somehow, beautiful Barb, played by actress Jeanne Tripplehorn, understood me. I entered her world and, like Barb, took Bills refusal very personally, forgetting that the show is supposed to be fiction. It was an extreme, bizarre case of an anthropologist going native with a television personality.
How is it that this prime-time drama about polygamy could so perfectly depict the nature of the gender and political battles we face in Mormon Country? How could it portray the narratives of marginalization many of us experienced during the famous Purges of the 90s so accurately? How could the writers, two gay men, generate, in five poignant seasons, the most blatant critique of the LDS Proclamation of the Family ever televised in the context of a program whose main tenet is that polygamy is A-OK?
Big Love has become a symbol to me, to my key informants who live in polygamy, and to the larger U.S. television public of the new American sexual revolution a revolution that is focused on alternative marriage and family. This symbol provides a global display of the struggles of a fundamentalist minority to overcome marginalization at the hands of the monogamous mainstream. It has become a sublime witness of my twenty years as an ethnographer, during which I tried to analyze the variability in polygamous lifestyle and at the same time fight to decriminalize plural marriage.
I have been blessed, as they say in Mormon culture, to have begun my fieldwork at a time of fundamentalist glasnost, when a few select journalists and scholars were allowed to visit polygamy compounds and towns. I was lucky to have selected such a complex and truly interesting topic (or did it select me?), one that paved the way for my status as a tenured full professor. Yet the costs of this research have been innumerable. I offended and alienated my church leadership, my friends and family, and my first husband (living with polygamists is not good for a healthy marriage!). I was sometimes at risk of arrest because of contempt of court charges for refusing to divulge the identity of my informants, who were, after all, guilty of third-degree felonies as well as other crimes (illegal arms possession, statutory rape, and so on). I may have put my daughters emotional and physical well-being at risk, having carted them to and from fundamentalist households during my intense three-year field studies, during which I relied heavily on herbal home remedies rather than a doctors care. I also risked the danger of compromising my ability to conduct research in certain groups by disobeying a patriarchs orders (I saved a childs life by taking her to the hospital against his wishes) and participating in courtship correspondence with two other wives (who believed that I might marry their husband, though I rebuffed their overtures). At one point, as a young doctoral researcher in my twenties, I felt myself truly going native, beginning to believe in the fundamentalist ideologies and customs. So I left the group for a season, fleeing to Oregon to meet with other hippy Mormon career moms, cut my long hair into a bob, and returned to find that my informants treated me with some disdain (only long-haired women can wash the feet of Christ when He returns).
