Dialogue, Volume 25, Number 2 - Dialogue – A Journal of Mormon ...

64 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT
crime, and coercions by General Authorities to hide or neglect an
incriminating fact. But I am more interested in exploring examples of
Mormon women — particularly those of us who consider ourselves liberated
from overt male control —who recognize and attempt to satisfy
our desire to assert autonomy and then unconsciously excise the means,
thereby thwarting our own purposes.
Although Mormon women sometimes exhibit signs of physical and
sexual abuse, genital mutilation is not culturally mandated or acceptable.
The clitoris's presence does represent possibility. Metaphorically,
we women on the Ouelessebougou expedition realized many of these
possibilities. First, we were in Africa. Thus, we had the freedom to
travel beyond our domestic environment. Except for the board
chairman's wife, who came primarily to accompany her husband, each
of us knew that we were able to be there because we had economic
means derived from an education and the ability to use skills to earn
and manage an income. Granted, our group was not typical; again
with the exception of the chairman's wife, we others were all single
and over thirty years old; only two of us had children. Had we been
married, most of us likely would not have been on that expedition. We
seemed free from the sexual hegemony that marks the Bambara women
both psychically and physically. Yet we are only slowly admitting
that Mormon sociological patterns for both sexes may be psychically
suffocating and ultimately destructive. Witness documented depression
among housewives, fear among homosexuals, and attempts to
suppress symposia and honest speaking from people who believe that
the glory of God is intelligence. Furthermore, sexual hegemony exists
no less in the Mormon culture than in the Bambara. Regardless of
secular leadership possibilities open to women, authorities in the LDS
Church feel more compelled now than ever before to control Church
structure, capital, ritual, and administration. And LDS women feel
compelled, no matter how "liberated" we may regard ourselves, to
allow men that privilege.
Frustrated by the sexual discrimination she observed in early
twentieth-century America, anthropologist Elsie Clewes Parsons noted
that "women cooperate in their own subjection ... by trying 'hard
to live down to what is expected of them' " (in Rosenberg 1982, 172).
Philosopher Antonio Gramsci observed that hegemony works from
both directions: a group dominates only with permission from subgroups.
Subordinate groups, be they racial, ethnic, religious, economic,
or gendered, may resist suppression with language and action, but
until they actually revolt (and risk becoming tyrannical themselves),
they primarily acquiesce to or support the ruling order (Lears 1985,
568-78).