Technologies of the Selfie: Mormon Influencers and the Performance of Gender Online

Colleen McDannell, in her bookSister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, observes that “in the American imagination, Mormon women still have not left the nineteenth century.”1 The public perception of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is colored by media portrayals that position them as the Other twice over: first, as members of a so-called weird religion and, second, as either victims or, as Mormon feminist blogger Heather Sundahl put it, handmaidens of the patriarchy.2 Since the 1990s Mormon women have been utilizing the internet and digital technologies as technologies of the self, tools of identity creation that at various times have challenged or upheld this public perception.This tension is representative of wider cultural impulses. Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler states, “One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and successors as well.”3 The act of performing one's body and one's gender is a necessarily public act. Mormon influencers in America have been engaged in public performances of femininity, utilizing social media as a public platform for declaring the shape and definition of what it means to be a woman in their religious tradition. If, as Butler claims, gender is “in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed,” but is, instead, “an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts,” then the repetitious posting of these female influencers acts as a means of reinforcing and re-creating the hegemonic or subversive feminine identity.4This essay uses Mormon women who act as social influencers to demonstrate how new and developing online spaces expand the possibilities for religious expression, power, and dialogue while also constricting the boundaries for what it means to be a publicly legible Mormon woman. If we view these content creators and online enclaves through Judith Butler's theory of performative gender, we can see how they have, through performative acts of creation in which the signifiers of gender embody and become the thing itself, shaped public perception of what it means to be a Mormon woman. As Michel Foucault notes, each act that supposedly reveals knowledge of sex or gender is also an act of concealment.5 These public acts of gender have, therefore, contributed to the homogenization of Mormon femininity in the public imagination, creating an image that is predominantly White and middle class, even when accounting for political and ideological differences within the LDS Church.It is helpful here to pause and consider the question of technology. Broadly understood, technology refers to using knowledge (particularly scientific knowledge) to interact with human life and the physical world. Technology can be a physical tool—something to augment human ability to run, jump, or open difficult jars—or it can be virtual—such as Microsoft Word, the program I am using to write this article. But the key identifier, traditionally, is used. Humans develop technology to enhance or restrict human life and activity. The technologies of the internet have many uses: they optimize data collection for analytics, they facilitate long-distance communication, and they assist in the building of social infrastructure. But technology is never inert or passive. The internet has also created new possibilities for identity technology. Foucault uses the word technology to refer to an intentional method, skill, or approach, neither negative nor positive inherently. Most relevant for the work being done by female influencers are technologies of the self. Technologies of the self can be utilized to improve, to shape, to change, to create ourselves, or to create happiness. A technology of the self is how we “do” ourselves—how we make what we believe will be happiness or some perfected identity.As the internet became accessible to more people and increasingly user-friendly, those tools that had enabled new forms of self-expression became technologies of the self. Users could now utilize them to shape, to carve the self, “transform[ing] themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”6 Foucault describes power and knowledge as twin structures that together create a loop of mutually beneficial production and naturalization. Discourses of power, which are invested in the idea of a natural or essential sex, require the correct performance of those naturalized identities. Internet identity technology is a new power that allows for these new bodily performances. That performance is then read, from the surface inward, as the evidence for the stable, essential identity. As Butler put it, “To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender.”7 Power collapses the distinctions between gender and its normative expression as a means of legitimizing the knowledge of essential sexed/gendered identities, which then further consolidates the authority of the dominant norm. Similarly, internet technologies of the self can be used to erase difference, to consolidate identity under a naturalized norm that is prevailingly White, heterosexual, American, and middle class.One arena in which performance has proven particularly fraught is race. As a religion founded in the United States, the LDS Church has a fraught history with Whiteness. Historian Paul Reeve argues that throughout the nineteenth century, Mormons were not “securely white” in the eyes of many in America.8 By that he means that they were denied the benefits and stature of hegemonic Whiteness, and were instead conflated with other marginalized groups and racialized as Other: “As outsiders viewed it, Mormon race was a performance, that is, Mormons acted racially degenerate, therefore they were racially degenerate.”9 Mormons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had what Reeve terms “aspirations toward whiteness,” meaning that while they were engaged in a tug of war between assimilation and peculiarity, the rules for assimilation required the performance of proper racial conduct.10The process of becoming legible as White for Mormon society included acceptance of prevailing racist norms. This process reveals the performative, stitched-together nature of race in American society. It reveals that race was, and is, a shifting category rather than a biological reality. After 1978, the church encountered a different problem: they went from not White enough to too White.11 In 2014, roughly 2 percent of Americans self-identified as Mormon or a member of the LDS Church; of that group, approximately 86 percent identified as White, according to the Pew Religious Landscape survey.12Much like the process of becoming legibly White, one can communicatively perform gender to achieve the particular status desired. In Butler's view, political ideologies, legal bodies, and cultural institutions have colluded to both create and naturalize gendered bodies, which is an apt illustration of Foucault's ideas of power and knowledge as they exist and operate in the world. When power sanctions certain truths about the body through the legitimizing force of institutionalized knowledge, those truths can be used for demographic classification. The doing of one's gender is thus a public act. One never “does” one's gender without an audience, even if that audience is imaginary, because gender can only be read through distinction and opposition.The construction of a digital self is similarly performative. Online identities are simultaneously highly curated, edited, and uniquely personal. These spaces allow users to become producers of identity and religious narrative. It diminishes the restrictions of locality and opens the possibilities for broad religious exchange. This means that authority can spread to those who would not otherwise have access to it, and a layperson can gain a following or achieve some level of prominence without going through the traditional channels, which have historically excluded minority members. Digital venues can thus exist in a religious third space, a sacred space situated between online and offline. This theory allows us to distinguish between digital environments based on user participation and function, as “[not] all Internet venues are automatically third spaces, but rather . . . certain websites, blogs, and social network platforms can become meaningful as they are charged with religious values.”13 While not all digital venues take hybrid form, platforms such as Instagram can be utilized by content creators and their followers to create a third space in which women's voices are centered. It is vital to consider the means of transmission as more than simply a tool, but instead as an important piece of the whole. The use of digital communication is fundamental rather than incidental. Within these spaces, women perform their gender while also shaping and constructing their cultural archetypes. The body of the religious woman is the canvas upon which the cultural and religious expectations are crafted into a solid gender identity.Modern Mormonism has both taken advantage of and critiqued these developments. James Cullimore, a Latter-day Saint General Authority, gave a talk at the 1973 General Conference in which he exhorted church members “to be in the world but not of the world,” as the title of his talk put it. He quoted from the Gospel of John, chapter 17, as well as several other verses from the Christian Bible to support his claim that Mormons “would not want to be free of our responsibility of being in the world by being taken out of the world, for this life is a probationary state. The ‘world’ is our opportunity to prove ourselves. This is a part of the great plan of the Lord, to be confronted with the things of the ‘world,’ that we might overcome them and be strengthened.”14 The world is a proving ground, a series of tests and trials that will strengthen and refine one's faith. Since the LDS Church also emphasizes missionary work, members must not cloister themselves away fully. As Cullimore put it, “The righteous lives of members of the Church throughout the world is a great leaven to the gospel loaf.”15 This cellophane identity, where one is sealed away but visible, this impermeable visibility, where influence flows only one way, is a key element to understanding Mormon subcultures. Social media, and digital spaces more generally, can be a means for Mormons to shape cultural trends and norms without inhabiting traditional seats of power.Much of the scholarly attention on Mormon online communities in the past decade has focused on Mormon feminists, who rose to national prominence through their outspoken criticism of the LDS Church. However, conservative and moderate women actually take up more real estate online. Attention is often centered on women who use their personal agency to buck or reject cultural norms, but many others use their agency to inhabit them. It is unfortunately common for conservative women, online and off, to be flattened into mere props for the patriarchy, but they are not passive.The internet's role as a third space for social construction has gone through multiple phases, each identified by the development of new technology and how that technology enhances or curtails user experience. These phases are assigned software designations, like Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and so on. It is in the phase of Web 2.0, roughly beginning in the early 2000s, that online content moved from largely static, informative pages to social networking and user interaction.16 Web 2.0 ushered in the era of widespread social networking, which broadened the possibilities of online community building and identity creation. In this era, according to Anna Poletti, a scholar of memory and autobiography whose work focuses on new media and materiality, new technologies of identity originate for many web users, and “acquiring and maintaining online identities make up the core activities of many users.”17 These early stages of identity technology and creation were made possible by developing new web technologies that made the Internet more interactive. However, the internet is not an unbounded space. While it does offer the opportunity for new identity technologies, those same technologies are simultaneously creating new norms and limits. When done online, identity is both, as Poletti and Julie Rak point out, a “process and a product.”18This dual identity becomes particularly relevant for the colloquially (and some would argue derisively) named “Mormon Mommy Bloggers,” although that term has largely fallen out of favor as online content creation shifted away from individual blogs to social media. It is more accurate to refer to this grouping as “lifestyle,” as it represents what bloggers within this category are doing: they are creating and marketing a particular lifestyle. An overlapping group focuses on homemaking and marriage, and blogs within this subgroup tend to be more overtly conservative and are more likely to blend in with political posts. Some move between fashion and more general lifestyle content, which can include parenting, marriage and family life, and homemaking. But all within this grouping create content that presents a carefully curated and crafted lifestyle and incorporates elements of personal narrative and life tips for the reader. McDannell explains that “Bloggers speak a ‘language’ that makes sense in the fantasy life of a particular type of woman but not to women living in most of the world.”19 A particular type of lifestyle influencer can commodify domesticity while also deflecting and downplaying her role as an income earner and businesswoman to perpetuate (and participate in) an idealized version of domestic bliss targeted to succeed in a capitalist and consumerist culture.Women in this category have found their niche through writing about a variety of topics related to personal and family life such as fashion, parenting, health and wellness, and travel. Within this category are several who have parlayed blogging into lifestyle brands and fashion lines, such as Rachel Parcell, a Mormon blogger who now has a fashion line sold exclusively at Nordstrom, an upscale department store. While only some of the bloggers in this category have that level of mainstream success, many have been able to make content creation a full-time job. The world of the lifestyle influencer is purposefully constructed to reflect a highly idealized gender performance. As McDannell explains, “Blogging reinvigorated Mormon domesticity, giving the stay-at-home mom not only a platform to assert the spiritual significance of nurturing children but also a place in the commercial economy.”20 Such influencers are using their platform to publicly construct a more traditional form of Mormon femininity, one that also utilizes existing language and ideals from within the Mormon tradition to create a gendered body that fits with the established expectations of femininity. By focusing on the importance of modesty and traditionally feminine occupations such as the “stay-at-home mom,” they can present female bodies that are modestly but attractively dressed as a means of remaking and reinforcing traditional gender identities.Lifestyle content relies on presenting the “correct” body; as such, it is important to revisit the category of race, and how Whiteness becomes encoded into lifestyle influencing. The type of identity creation performed online by prominent influencers can have a centralizing and consolidating effect. As Foucault notes, when talking about the institution and creation of the individual, narratives that legitimize power structures are naturalized and invested with authority in a mutually affirming cycle.21 Thus, individuals are both the effect and the vehicle of power. When one style of subject gains prominence and thus legitimacy, that body becomes naturalized and presented as a prediscursive “natural” norm. In naturalizing certain subjects as a norm or ideal, we hide or bury the societal forces that allow one type of subject to gain prominence, instead presenting a unified, natural ideal.The women who are most likely to gain national or international prominence are therefore overwhelmingly White and heterosexual, and women who want to gain and maintain a large audience within these traditions must carefully navigate conservative complementarian gender ideologies. Women can make themselves acceptable by being legibly feminine within their traditions, thus covertly signaling that they are abiding by, and conforming to, gendered difference. The LDS Church has employed what Joanna Brooks calls “an allegedly canonized mish-mash of Old Testament genealogies” to justify particularly anti-Black racism, often arguing that people of African descent inherited the curse of Cain, or were descendants of Ham, thus inheriting his curse for disobedience.22 Such claims were used in the Americas to justify slavery as well as the exclusion of Black Mormons from priesthood ordination and temple rituals. White women accept and participate in racist hierarchical systems to attain and maintain some level of authority or power, thus reinforcing those hierarchies that will continue to harm and exclude women of color, employing what Julie Ingersoll calls creative blending, which melds elements of choice feminism with conservative gender ideology.23 These women then emphasize the role of personal choice in determining one's future rather than acknowledging societal barriers because those barriers are invisible to them due to their privileged position. By naturalizing one bodily narrative, they disguise the fact that it is based on the White experience, which is not and cannot be women who have their into their personal lifestyle influencers must the between the image they and their Judith Butler that is no body and that bodies are into through and are both public and a social is no core gendered identity, but rather and the effect of an core or but this on the surface of the body, through the of that but never the of identity as a As Butler states, gender is only made up of those things that are to be its meaning that a body, and particularly a gendered body, is a public act. The performance is then read from the in as evidence for an stable, or legible identity. If it is that terms by which we are as human are and this means that the norms that gender and gendered expression are only in to an done with the in even if that is the influencers to and what they to to the public perception of what it means to be a Mormon woman. are social and female content creators must style themselves in such a way as to be to their audience as members of their religious thus that is a of bodily style rather than bodily