Reluctant Monogamy: Secularism, Sex, and Early Mormonism,

Peter Coviello’s paper sketches the story of Mormons from the period of their emergence as a dissident sect through to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Coviello shows that this renunciation, by which the... [ view full abstract ]

Peter Coviello’s paper sketches the story of Mormons from the period of their emergence as a dissident sect through to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Coviello shows that this renunciation, by which the Mormons attained statehood for Utah, marked also the culmination of a fantastically vexed history, in which the Mormons had appeared by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, “American Mohammedans,” racialized refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and eventual white nationalists, protected in their citizenship less by the secular state’s offer of “toleration” than by the wages of sovereign whiteness. Coviello’s paper focuses particularly on the unruly theological possibilities broached by the cosmology of early Mormonism: the belief that the body is an instrument of fantastic pleasure, hence divinization; the ability for women to obtain an equivalent manner of godhead; and for anti-imperial critique to be expressed via early Mormon scripture. Coviello concludes by proposing that as Mormons come to be figured more decisively in terms of racialized depravity proper to erring belief, so too did they seek actively to foreclose these glimpsed counterpossibilities, exemplifying a deperverting, enfranchising logic of homonationalism.