Keynote: "A Material Girl in a Material World: Mormonism, Materialism and Gender

Speaker 1

I’m very pleased to announce the first of our two excellent keynote speakers. Rosalind Welch holds degrees in English literature from Brigham Young University and the University of California. San Diego, where her dissertation focused on private conscience in early modern English literature. She writes on interreligious issues for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, and she blogs on Mormon issues at timesandseas. org. She also serves as the managing editor of the Mormon Review, and she steals the occasional afternoon to pursue her own research agendas in early modern literature and Mormon literature and philosophy. Rosalind and her husband, together with their four young children, make their home in St. Louis, Missouri. Welcome, Rosalind.

Rosalynde Welch

The title of my talk is A Material Girl in a Material World: Mormonism, Materialism, and Gender. There will be no karaoke. I was thinking it might be have been nice to have a little Madonna playing as I walked up the aisle, though. So I think next year I’m going to recommend bumper music for all the speakers. Take note.

Rosalynde Welch

It is really such an honor, and it’s been a real pleasure for me to be here with you today to learn from the talks that we’ve just heard. Thank you to the organizers for inviting me. I was wondering whether what I had to say would really fit here at the Mormon Transhumanist Association. If the law of citations is correct. I think I do fit in. I think every thinker that I cite in my talk today has already been cited by a previous speaker. So I think that my remarks will fit in well with what we’ve already learned today.

Rosalynde Welch

I was a radical feminist for about 48 hours in 1995. It’s true. Sitting in the Marriott Center as a twenty-year-old BYU student, I listened to President Hinckley read the Proclamation on the Family for the first time to the assembled masses. I looked around at my fellow students, and I wondered if I was the only one whose blood was silently boiling. It felt intolerable to be defined from outside, to be told who I am and why and what that meant. I remember walking directly to the library afterwards, finding a Carol, sitting down and scribbling my objections furiously on the back cover of a packet of readings for my Feminist Literary Theory seminar. Gender is a social construct. It’s a performance. I get to decide what it means for me to be a woman. My packet told me so. My sense of irony was undeveloped as a freshman.

Rosalynde Welch

Ten years later, the anger had ebbed, time had passed, and I found myself as an evolutionary psychologist for about nine months. Pregnant with my third child in 2005, I discovered a book called Mother Nature by the biologist Sarah Hurdy. I vividly remember lying on my side at night, because you can’t lie on your back when you’re pregnant, as you know if you’ve been pregnant. I would lie on my side night after night. Reading deep into the wee hours, I was transfixed by what I read with a kind of visceral recognition of the instinctive mammalian maternal behaviors that Sarah Hurdy described. Gradually yet inexorably, my hunch about sex and gender shifted. Gendered behaviors, I felt, are instinctive. They’re rooted in reproductive incentives and the deep evolutionary history of our species.

Rosalynde Welch

Thus, over the past 20 years, my personal intuitions about the meaning of sex and gender have spanned pretty much the full gamut of available cultural alternatives. And I come to a study of gender in Mormonism without a strong allegiance to any single account.

Rosalynde Welch

Despite my initial recoil sitting there in the Marriott Center, the proclamation is the future of gender for Mormonism. It makes a provocative, challenging, and internally tense set of claims about gender that defies both conservative and progressive wisdom. The proclamation makes two related but orthogonal philosophical claims about gender. First, gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. And second, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. In other words, sexual difference is real. Sexual equality is real.

Rosalynde Welch

We’ve grown accustomed to hearing the language of the proclamation as its profile has grown in the Institutional Church, and perhaps we miss how radical the claims it’s making really are. Despite the fact that the proclamation is often seen as a throwback to 50s gender roles, the philosophical claim is precisely the opposite. If gender is eternal then it can’t be fully identified with any particular cultural construct. That opens up huge tracts of speculative thinking room, though of course, it does not divorce us from history, nor would I want that kind of a divorce.

Rosalynde Welch

Consider for a moment how comprehensively the phrase equal partners ruptures the notion of the weaker sex that has structured Western gender discourse since antiquity. Further, what does it mean to advance both claims at once, to say that men and women are interdependent, equal partners in light of the sexual difference that structures their relationship? The more we consider both claims together, the more difficult it becomes to grasp them in relationship to each other.

Rosalynde Welch

They’re not merely two sibling properties of gender, like the size and shape of a ball. Instead, there are really two different kinds of claims. The naked fact of sexual difference has always been known to human cultures, though of course the nature of that difference is Is interpreted differently. Sexual difference is an accessible aspect of reality that remains perpetually available to mammalian perception.

Rosalynde Welch

On the other hand, sexual equality occupies a different position with respect to history and reality. It’s largely unrealized. It’s often unthinkable. Furthermore, these two claims of sexual difference and sexual equality tend to exist in an inverse cultural relationship. In cultures where sexual difference is strongly emphasized, sexual equality often recedes. Conversely, in cultures where sexual equality is strongly emphasized, gender difference tends to be de-emphasized. But the proclamation commits us to both.

Rosalynde Welch

And not just to a compromise or a balance between the two claims, like as a seesaw carefully balanced half and half for sexual difference, half for sexual equality. Men and women are semi-different but semi-equal. The proclamation snaps the seesaw at its center and plants both halves in the ground as flagpoles and runs Flags up to the top of each. The flags of sexual equality and sexual difference, a fullness of difference and a fullness of equality. That is the proclamation.

Rosalynde Welch

So my argument today is that Mormonism’s metaphysical materialism helps us make sense of these claims and helps us to put them in a relationship of mutual ascendance, not of reciprocal eclipse. What would a rigorously materialist reading of the Family Proclamation even look like? How does or how should our metaphysics inform our meanings for sex and gender? I’ll answer this question first by exploring the implications of Mormon materialism, and then by looking at the meaning of eternal gender and eternal partnership in light of our radically material roots.

Rosalynde Welch

Mormonism is a species of materialism, by which I mean the claim that nothing exists except matter and its movements and its modifications. Mormon materialism is founded on two canonized revelations. Doctrine and Covenants 131, verses 7-8. There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter. but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

Rosalynde Welch

Further, Mormonism claims that matter is co-eternal with God. Doctrine of Covenants 93, 29. Man was also in the beginning with God. intelligence or the light of truth was not created or made, neither indeed can be. So these claims that everything is matter and that matter is uncreated seem straightforward enough on the surface.

Rosalynde Welch

But in truth, they represent a sweeping revision of Western thought founded on Platonic idealism, which strictly divides perfect, eternal spirit from fallen, decaying matter. Joseph’s intriguing, but admittedly elliptical statements have long attracted thinkers looking for a metaphysical foundation for Mormon teachings.

Rosalynde Welch

Adventurous early Mormon lay theologians like the Pratt brothers, whom we’ve heard from today, explored the implications of the new revelations, positing a radically unified cosmos, a new Mormon monism. in which spirit and matter share a single intelligent substance, and the ontological divide between material and divine is dissolved. Much of this audacious theology was subdued during the 20th century’s institutional consolidation and assimilation, with only sort of disconnected teachings of God’s corporeality and human deification. remaining as traces in mainstream Mormon circulation.

Rosalynde Welch

But recently, Mormonism’s materialist metaphysics has attracted a new set of scholars who see its potential to engage with modern cosmological inquiry from an entirely new position. To reset the tired debates about science and religion. Among these scholars are Terrell Gibbons and Stephen Webb. Each of whom has produced new and significant volumes on Mormon theology, and each of whom points to a thoroughgoing materialism as Mormonism’s most important theological innovation.

Rosalynde Welch

Given Wrestling the Angel concedes that Pratt’s and later following on Brigham Young’s exotic extrapolations from Smith’s radical materialism may be mere speculation, but Gibbons argues, the fundamental claim of a thoroughgoing materialism gave indelible definition to the Mormon theological landscape. That’s a strong claim. Everything about Mormon theology is inflected by its materialism.

Rosalynde Welch

Webb’s book Mormon Christianity. And at much greater length in his full-length study, Jesus Christ Eternal God, Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter, Webb argues forcefully that That, quote, Mormons are the only significant Christian denomination or movement to demur from this line of platonic analysis of matter. Mormons claim to know what matter is, and they claim that matter is absolutely good in every way. Far from being nothing, matter, for the saints, is the very stuff of the divine. Joseph Smith, Webb suggests, foresaw a middle ground between Plato’s immaterialism and the secular atheistic ideology of materialism.

Rosalynde Welch

Among the many things to be appreciated from Gibbons’s and Webb’s learned treatments is the difficulty of actually getting your head around a thoroughgoing, radical, truly monistic materialism. It’s not so very difficult to conceptualize an embodied God and a material heaven. In many ways, God as a person and heaven as a place are a child’s first intuitions, which Joseph perceived. transparently in his visions, and on which he then proceeded to reveal a cosmos of breathtaking originality.

Rosalynde Welch

But it’s easy to stop there, to stop short in our thinking through a material universe, moving God and heaven and spirits Into the realm of the time-bound and the material, but leaving in their place another set of eternal, unchanging ideals like eternal law or absolute truth or the moral order. So we might end up with a system in which God, now an exalted yet passable, that is, capable of being moved. Man, God no longer exercises absolute sovereignty over human destiny, but instead Human destiny is determined through our living, quote, in a way consistent with eternal principles. And I’m quoting from Gibbons here. Eternal, unchanging, absolute law. begins to sound a lot like the way we used to describe God, doesn’t it?

Rosalynde Welch

Indeed, Gibbon states outright that dualism is rewritten in Joseph’s Revelations as two-tiered monism with spirit as a more refined matter. and laws are themselves as eternal as God. In other words, Platonic dualism still persists pretty much fully intact. With God simply transferred to the realm of the material and eternal law or moral ideals taking his place in the realm of pure spirit. Now this may be a coherent metaphysics in itself, and indeed maybe this really is what Joseph was getting at. I don’t know that I am personally ready to commit to a thoroughgoing materialism, but if that’s what we accept, we have to acknowledge that it is not actually a materialism. It’s still an idealism in disguise.

Rosalynde Welch

In a thoroughgoing materialism, there can be no distinct realm of the ideal. Everything is matter. even laws, ideas, principles, social constructs. But how can an idea be material? How can a social construct be matter? It’s not an easy thing to get your head around.

Rosalynde Welch

Part of the problem might be that in contemplating matter, we focus too much on mass. and space and solidity, and not enough on particularity. I’m about to talk science and I previously disclosed I was an English major, so please do not throw tomatoes at me. I’ll take cover I’ll take cover behind Stephen Webb, who writes, the most common definition of matter is any object that takes up space and has mass. However, some bosons, like the most the much celebrated Higgs boson, do not have mass, and space is just as hard to define as matter is. So rather than defining matter by mass or solidity or position in space, perhaps we would better approach the met the physical nature of the universe by defining matter in terms of particularity.

Rosalynde Welch

Matter is always particular. It’s never general. A particle is a particle in particular. It’s not a particle in general. Each atom is a specific atom, not an immaterial instantiation of the idea of an atom. Particularity is a way to conceptualize materiality when concepts like mass and solidity just don’t work.

Rosalynde Welch

Conversely, ideality is by definition not particular and not specific. That is why God in the classical Platonic formulation Can have no parts or divisions, right? God has no body parts or passions, because that would single out parts of the divine in particular, and thus God would cease to be ideal and perfect. So if we’re going to think all the way through a radical Mormon materialism, and if matter is particularity more than mass or solidity,

Rosalynde Welch

we can think of a moral law, say, not as an object having mass or occupying space, but as a particular entity. A particular formulation, having a particular history and a particular composition and pursuing a particular purpose. Understood as particularity, materialism can accommodate abstractions like law, idea, and construct.

Rosalynde Welch

Just as we tend to focus maybe too much on mass and not enough on particularity, I think we also tend to focus too much on space and not enough on time when we consider matter. Matter may or may not take up space, as we’ve seen, but it must exist in time or some relation to time. In a thoroughgoing materialism, temporality must be built into ontology because material objects Exist in time, and thus they are always subject to change, whether that change is understood as decay or as progress. Conversely, the ideal is eternal and unchanging because precisely because it exists outside of time. That’s why the idea of a God who progresses is so anathema to Platonic inflected creedal Christianity. Because a God who progresses is a God who exists in time, and that means a God who is not ideal.

Rosalynde Welch

Indeed, the moral cosmos revealed by Joseph Smith is thoroughly temporal, inherently oriented in time toward the growing good. As Stephen Webb puts it, progress, not regress, is built into nature. It is the destiny of all matter to become more spiritual. But of course, that doesn’t mean less material, because all spirit is matter.

Rosalynde Welch

What sometimes comes across as a kind of naïve or banal optimism in Mormonism, these notions of self-improvement, personal progress Enduring to the end. This is actually a trace of our radically material worldview in which all spirit is matter. That is, all spirit exists in time and thus is ever subject to change. Not only all spirit, but also all laws, ideas, constructs and abstractions exist in time, and thus they themselves are subject to improvement, development, or decay.

Rosalynde Welch

Indeed, God Himself, like the lowliest subatomic particle, is divisible, finite, and changeable, and thereby as matter, not simple, infinite, or immutable. So I’d like to draw out two implications of this radical Mormon materialism, still in brackets. Still a speculative exercise. Like I said, I’m not willing to bet the farm on this quite yet, but it’s a good exercise to think through before I turn finally to gender.

Rosalynde Welch

First, given what I’ve just said about time and changeability built into the fundamental nature of a material universe, what does that do to a concept of eternity? How can we possibly conceptualize the eternal in time? In an idealism, the eternal is precisely the ideal, dwelling in a realm outside of time and that’s beyond change, perfect, universal, whole. And that is indeed how we tend to think about eternal law, moral principles, and indeed eternal gender, right? A perfect ideal of womanhood or manhood, an unchanging essence. which women and men aim to approach and ultimately fulfill.

Rosalynde Welch

But in a radical materialism we have to give up that notion. Matter exists in time, always subject to change, and thus our notion of the eternal must be dynamic, not static. As Webb puts it, Mormons are committed to this dynamic view of divinity because they believe that there is no eternity outside of time. Everything is in time, and if so, then everything grows and changes, including God. Eternity is real, but eternity means no end to change, not unchanging.

Rosalynde Welch

Now I think there’s a reasonable and important objection to be made to this idea, that if we take laws, principles and morals out of the eternal realm, out of eternity, put them in time, we make them changeable. We make them relative. And that somehow lessens their force or their legitimacy. And I think that that’s a valid objection. There’s something to that. I think it’s true that an idealism can exert essential control over its imagined cosmos. in a way that materialism just can’t replicate.

Rosalynde Welch

But it’s worth remembering that Mormons have long accepted the idea of a changeable, changing, progressing, developing God. We do no more violence to the idea of law or commandments by placing them in time than we do by placing God in the same category. Eternal law, too, is changeable, changing, progressing, developing. Again, Webb, as you can see, he’s my primary interlocutor here. God is supremely self-surpassing, even if his capacity for growth and progress is built into the nature of the cosmos. God exemplifies, we could say, the upper limit of the law of increase. The law of increase, itself a material thing, is another name for the divine in time, and I don’t think that we need to fear it.

Rosalynde Welch

Finally, much too much talk of science so far. It’s time for some rhetoric. Idealism primes us to think metaphorically. Whereas materialism requires us to think metonymically. As a refresher, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one entity is substituted for another entity. related by similarity. But metonomy is a figure of speech in which one entity stands for another contiguous entity.

Rosalynde Welch

So for example, the beehive is a metaphor for Mormonism. The beehive substitutes for the church, connected by the qualities of industry and cooperation. On the other hand, the Salt Lake Temple is a metonym for Mormonism. The temple stands in for the church because it is geographically and also conceptually contiguous with Mormon origins.

Rosalynde Welch

So, in an idealism, we’re always looking for the material down below to resemble the ideal. or we’re mentally substituting the ideal for the material. We’re primed to think in terms of substitution, equivalence, unity, correspondence, and most of all in terms of the qualities of objects. What is womanhood like? Right? And am I, as a woman, like the qualities of womanhood?

Rosalynde Welch

In a materialism, however, particularity is the name of the game, and thus substitution or perfect correspondence is not the aim. Two particular agents can never perfectly correspond to one another. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be particular. Instead, we think in terms of position, gradation, contiguity, plurality, alliance, and most of all, the context of objects.

Rosalynde Welch

Webb gets at the metonymic logic of Mormon materialism when he writes that Joseph inferred, quote, that the world consists of levels and layers of matter rather than two kinds of substance. Right, so levels and layers, that’s metonymy. Two kinds of substance, that’s metaphor. These layers can be graded on a scale from the most material to the most spiritual. But even at the bottom of the scale, no bit of matter, however minuscule, is completely isolated from God’s sweeping majesty.

Rosalynde Welch

Salvation, then, according to a theology structured by metonym rather than by metaphor, would not be understood as perfect unity or perfect correspondence of the individual with God or with God’s eternal laws. but rather as alliance or contiguity, nearness to God. And indeed, I believe that is what we see in Mormon teachings on salvation.

Rosalynde Welch

Now this matters for my talk today because we are strongly primed to think metaphorically about gender, given the idealism that dominates gender discourse. We want to know what gender is, right? We want to know what are the qualities of maleness and femaleness, what males and females resemble, and how, especially, we can substitute the ideal for the real. But a materialist gender discourse really doesn’t care about the answers to those questions. When we think metonymically about gender, we instead ask what gender is about what it works on, what it does, what it’s part of, and what it’s near. It requires a significant mental shift to think about sex and gender in this way.

Rosalynde Welch

Halftime, folks, halfway through. Do you need a rest him to stand up and stretch our legs? I need a drink. I always do head, shoulders, knees and toes with the primary children. I’m the primary chorister, and that always a welcome respite. Okay, sexual difference is real.

Rosalynde Welch

So then how should Mormonism’s materialist, metonymic metaphysics inform our understanding of gender. Let’s get to the rubber to the road here. Materialist gender discourses, those that specifically rule out unchanging and ideal types of maleness and femaleness. Those would be ideal gender discourses. But materialist gender discourses generally fall into two camps.

Rosalynde Welch

The first is biological sex. Right? The set of genetic, endocrine, and morphological features produced by deep evolutionary pressures which govern sexual dimorphism and sexual reproduction. The growing prominence of evolutionary psychology, which is, as I said, has moved me, yielding a mixed harvest Of popular volumes, some of which are very insightful, some of which are very sloppy. But evolutionary psychology has deepened our understanding of biological sex, its origins, and its integral influence on human behavior and incentives.

Rosalynde Welch

The second type of gender materialism is some version of social constructionism, the thesis that gender is a set of social norms only loosely related to biological sex, which sanction particular roles and behaviors for men and women. Note that any particular social construction of gender might include a form of gender idealism, right? But the theory of social constructionism itself doesn’t rest on ideal gender categories. Indeed,

Rosalynde Welch

Usually, it’s deployed specifically to denaturalize gender ideals, right? I want to note that I I’m not going to rigorously differentiate between sex and gender in this talk, although I loosely stick to the accepted understandings of sex as biological and gender as cultural. But I but an important part of my argument is the idea that from a materialist perspective We don’t need to be prescriptively doctrinaire about distinguishing sex from gender or the biological from the cultural. Both are legitimate and overlapping ways of talking about men and women, and both are material, if we’re materialists.

Rosalynde Welch

So a thoroughgoing Mormon materialism welcomes both somatic and social accounts of gender. The goodness and legitimacy of the body is well attested in Mormon teaching, reaching its apogee in God’s own divinely gendered body. At the same time, the legitimacy of social constructs is also well attested in Mormon teachings on the council in heaven and the collaborative creation of the world, the greatest of all social constructs. In principle, Mormons have no need to reject either biological or constructive understandings of gender. So then what would a materialist understanding of gender rule out?

Rosalynde Welch

Well, any account of gender resting on a reductive biological or social determinism, since such of you fundamentally misapprehends the nature of agency? It would reject any account that denies gender’s basic reality as a category or dismisses it as mere false consciousness, since that fundamentally misapprehends the nature of the eternal. And remember the proclamation commits us to eternal gender, or any account that denies the particularity and plurality of matter, since that fundamentally misapprehends the nature of materiality.

Rosalynde Welch

So for instance, I believe a Mormon materialism would exclude a rigorously closed and deterministic scientism that reduces sex to known chemical processes and physical causation. It would reject us not only because it’s bad theology, but because it’s bad materialism, right? And our era of unfolding quantum physics. Strict Newtonian determinism no longer accounts for matter at the scale we are coming to know it. But please do not interrogate me on quantum physics in the Q and A. I beg you. But Mormon materialism, with its conception of matter as alive, intelligent, and self-directing at some level, is very hospitable to a more sophisticated, open, and emergent biological approach to gender.

Rosalynde Welch

Similarly, a Mormon materialism would probably push back against something like Judith Butler’s argument that gender categories are purely performative, a malign artifact of patriarchy, and substantively null. However, a Mormon materialism could easily accommodate the thesis that gender discourse is overdetermined by the relations of power operative in a particular social moment, say the classic 1950s breadwinner-nurturer pair. We don’t need to worry about recognizing social constructionism in gender.

Rosalynde Welch

But what if a Mormon materialism in all its pluralistic hospitality embraces, frankly, contradictory accounts of gender, as these often are, right? That’s actually not a problem in the material world when we’re thinking metonymically and not metaphorically. Just as the Establishment Clause in the U. S. Constitution establishes or endorses no master narrative of gender, but rather allows many accounts I’m sorry. As the U. S. Constitution establishes or endorses no master state religion, but rather allows many religions to compete. I had a little cut and paste error going on there. Similarly, Mormon materialism sponsors no master narrative of gender, but allows many even contradictory gender discourses. to flourish and compete.

Rosalynde Welch

Remember, as materialists, we’re not interested in equivalence, substitution or perfect correspondence. We’re interested only in particularity and plurality. in combinations and contests and alliances. We’re a lot more interested, that is, in what gender does than in what it is. Now that seems like a frustrating, tricky non-answer if you are looking for specific qualities to fill ideal gender categories. So if you’re a gender idealist, that’s not going to work for you.

Rosalynde Welch

But if you’re looking to understand history, in particular the history of Mormon family formation, Moving away from ideal gender categories makes sense of what can otherwise seem like bewildering social confusion when you look at our history of family formation Looking closely at the working parts of Mormonism, you will certainly find a motley collection of historically contingent socially constructed souvenirs from whatever culture Mormonism was traversing whenever it countered a particular institutional need. When you look, this omnivorous habit is especially apparent in the ongoing development of Mormon family formation, which includes bits and pieces from Old Testament polygamy. The post-polygamy Victorianism of the late 19th and 20th centuries, the romantic companionate marriage ideal of mid-20th century, and the intensively child-centered family norms of our current information age.

Rosalynde Welch

So what are we supposed to make of the foreign objects, right? The socially constructed objects that we find embedded in the bowels of Mormon gender teachings and practices? If Mormonism were committed to an ideal model of truth, a truth that exists perfect and uncreated and eternal, untouched by history’s messy fingerprints, then we would be in trouble. It would be a real threat to find social constructs at the heart of our theology. Angel in the house of Victorianism positively sticky with the fingerprints of history, has no place in the pristine parlor of an ideal truth that apparently transcends location or context. But Mormonism doesn’t claim to dwell in this rarefied parlor.

Rosalynde Welch

Our essential story of the origin of the universe, the Grand Council in Heaven, offers a model of truth originating not in an empty parlor, but in a lively family room. The Council of the Eternal Gods of all the Council of the Eternal God of all the other gods from DNC 121. Truth, in other words, not only can survive history’s greasy fingerprints, but indeed requires for its coherence a social location and context. A materialist worldview has no reason to fear the socially constructed forms at its very center.

Rosalynde Welch

Thus, while it doesn’t answer the question, what is gender? Materialism does give us a promising way out of the cul-de-sac that consumes so many Mormon blog conversations about gender. Right? The notion that if we can just strip away the false biases of cultural conditioning, we’ll finally arrive at a core of eternal truth about gender. The problem, of course, obviously, is that there’s no way to distinguish culture from eternal truth, aside from projecting our own prejudgments onto the question. So we end up merely wrapping our own views in the mantle of truth and labeling our opponents as cultural constructs. Not only is this boring and oh so predictable, but it’s category mismatch, right? We’re using the mental tools of idealism to try to wring answers from a material reality. It just doesn’t work.

Rosalynde Welch

But a thoroughgoing materialism gives us a way out of this bind. It allows us to acknowledge the obvious reality that gender discourse is socially constructed. And to legitimate and dignify this ongoing cooperative work, call it cosmic constructionism, if you like, without getting snagged on the contentious and unanswerable questions of ideal gender equalities.

Rosalynde Welch

So, if, this is a big if, if I have succeeded in convincing you that the question of what gender is should be secondary to the question of what it does, then by this point you’re probably asking. Screaming internally, Okay, then what does gender do? Here is my thesis. Especially, but not exclusively in the context of marriage, gender introduces the truth. of sexual difference that partakes of and stands in for the particularity of all matter. Gender metonymically figures the fundamental nature of matter itself.

Rosalynde Welch

Remember, metonymy, the part standing for the whole, enacts the basic relation of the particular to the plural. One particular part figures the entire constellation of agents and objects constituting the whole. Thus, when you think about it, metonymy is a way of describing the basic ontological condition in materialism. To exist is to be a metonym, to be one part. of a teeming pluralism and to be charged with acting inevitably in and on behalf of the whole.

Rosalynde Welch

Material agency, then, is enabled by the interplay between irreducible difference, whatever it is that makes a particular object itself. And irreducible plurality, its position and movement among other agents. That’s how we can think about agency in a material context. Like all material conditions, gender is structured by this tension between an object’s resistance to relation, its difference, and its availability for relation. Its position in plurality, but gender foregrounds that tension in visible and visceral ways, unmatched by any other human experience.

Rosalynde Welch

As a woman and a man circle one another, in the ancient choreography of approach and encounter, gender works to produce difference. To introduce friction and resistance into the dance by means of the other’s ceaseless failure to correspond to the self. Yes, to produce and to introduce precisely this gender trouble. In an idealism

Rosalynde Welch

Marriage and sexual difference culminate in perfect union, completion, perfect satisfaction, right? This is the romantic ideal of love. Plato famously figures romantic love as discovering one’s actual other half. But a marriage of eternal but a marriage of material beings, which is to say eternal marriage, is, on the contrary, an interruption or a calling into question of one’s personal satisfactions by the truth of the other’s irreducible difference. Now please don’t understand me to be making men are from Mars, women are from Venus type of argument. Yes. Sexual difference is the genesis of both erotic attraction and gender conflict, but it is much more than that.

Rosalynde Welch

Sexual difference stands in for the difference The particularity that fundamentally constitutes matter itself. This is an idea that Adam Miller gets at it in his essay, Love, Truth, and the Meaning of Marriage, when he writes. In an eternal marriage, the hegemony of our respective symbolic positions is broken by an excess for which we did not and cannot account. The eternal does not valorize the integrity of the individual, nor celebrate the synthesis of two individuals into a greater whole. Instead, that would be ideal ideal marriage, right? Instead, eternal or material marriage is the declaration of persistent fidelity to the discovery that there are two That there is not just life, singular, but lives plural. This revelation, this insertion of the sexual difference The splitting of my one into a shared fidelity to the two is the key to the highest kingdom in the celestial order.

Rosalynde Welch

Now just as it’s easy to slip from a thoroughgoing materialism back into a kind of covert idealism, it’s also easy to backpedal from this bracing view of gender in marriage, the idea that gender is meant to produce difference, not to produce unity. It’s constantly tempting to try to paper over the chasm between the sexes, for one position to subsume the other. in a quest for perfect unity. Maybe if we just get to know each other better, we’ll realize that there really is no chasm at all, we think. But this is precisely what a material worldview will not allow us to do. when we’re working in the language of metonymy rather than metaphor, a perfect oneness of natures, a frictionless coincidence of interests Is not what we’re after. Particularity is built into every atom, every subatomic particle, in a beautiful welter of indelible difference. The power and promise of eternal gender opens to our view in the most intimate and inescapable way the world as it really is.

Rosalynde Welch

One more section, folks. We’re getting close. Finally, sexual equality is real. So I’ve just argued that the work of gender in Mormonism is deeply entwined in its distinctive materialist metaphysics. It may be that gender is so central to human experience that it will inform or inflect any metaphysics of any flavor, but it’s certainly true that gender is also closely related to Platonic idealism.

Rosalynde Welch

Stephen Webb summarizes the Platonic theory of forms. For Plato, eternal forms or ideals provide the foundation for the world as we know it. And thus they are not part of the physical world. They are real, but they exist in an ideal realm accessible to the intellect, not the senses. Indeed, the forms are more real than the worldly things precisely because they do not exist in space and time. Not being limited by space, they are universally true. And not being limited by time, they are ternally true.

Rosalynde Welch

So if ideal remember, we’re back in idealism for a moment here. If ideal forms are immaterial, active, indivisible, eternal and universal, then matter, on the other hand, is corporeal, changeable, corrupt, and passive. Binary opposite here. So Aristotle inherited Plato’s doctrine of the forms, and he built upon it a full-blown physics and metaphysics, including a theory of sexual difference structured by these categories of form and matter.

Rosalynde Welch

So Aristotle reasons. There must be there must needs be that which generates and that from which it generates. Right? Even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different. And in those animals that have these powers separate in two sexes, the body and nature of the active and the passive sex must also differ. If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen, but material for the semen to work upon.

Rosalynde Welch

So for Aristotle the male principle, the semen Is immaterial form and energy, while the female is gross matter and potentiality, awaiting the male to give the male form to give it definition. So this definition of matter and its relation to form has had a truly millennial career in Western thought, structuring gender discourse through its many Christian iterations and well into the early modern period, which is what I specialize in. Its hierarchical and misogynistic implications naturalize the female as the weaker vessel and the male as her rightful master and mind.

Rosalynde Welch

While scientific understanding of sexual reproduction has moved beyond Aristotelian metaphysics, some contemporary gender discourses continue to harbor Platonic distinctions between form and matter. And its accompanying and pernicious categories of male and female. Think of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, right? My fair lady. Higgins takes Eliza as inert material, unformed and passive, or so he thinks. In need of his generative male energy, or semen, as Aristotle would have it, to shape her into the lady Higgins envisions. Idealism, then, has historically sponsored sexual inequality of the harshest varieties, particularly in combination with Christianity.

Rosalynde Welch

So what would a Christian gender discourse look like if Platonic idealism were stripped out? Well, Mormonism offers a fascinating test case. Stephen Webb argues that if you take Plato away from Christianity, you get something very much like the Mormon conception of the divine. Mormonism dissolves Plato’s hierarchy of form over matter, investing the material with life, intelligence and agency. Webb judges that the Mormons are the only significant Christian denomination or movement to demur from Platonism’s line of analysis about matter. Mormons claim to know what matter is, and they claim that matter is absolutely good in every way. Far from being nothing, matter for the saints is the very stuff of the divine.

Rosalynde Welch

By rehabilitating and universalizing matter, a thoroughgoing materialism deconstructs the metaphysical binary that for millennia has coded women as inferior, dependent, and corporeal. In its redemption of matter, Mormonism has discovered the conceptual tools to dismantle the pernicious sexism that haunts idealism.

Rosalynde Welch

Now I want to be careful here, because there’s a risk of merely inverting and reifying Platonism in a Mormon valorization of the material. So I’m not arguing that our elevation of the material in itself is a direct and immediate elevation of women. To make that argument would simply be to accept Aristotle’s implicit connection between women and matter, but just to flip it on its head, right? And say, well, actually, matter and women are great. We’d never actually escape idealism. We would just turn it on its head. Instead, Mormonism sweeps away the distinction between form and matter and thrusts everything and everybody into the material world. Men and women may at last meet each other on something like a level metaphysical playing field.

Rosalynde Welch

So if this is the case, if indeed Mormonism’s monistic materialism redresses the sexist categories of Platonism I think it’s fair to ask then why Mormonism’s social history and our evolving gender categories have not fully reflected this radical liberation. Indeed, from some perspectives, Mormonism significantly lags behind the broader culture in implementing gender equality. I think part of the answer is that Platonic thinking is so pervasive in broader Christianity and in Western thought generally, that we just haven’t fully understood what our materialism means.

Rosalynde Welch

Even our most intrepid theological explorer of the monistic Mormon worldview, Orson Pratt, continually collapsed back into idealistic thinking as he probed the conceptual limits of Joseph’s revelations. If we have not yet fully grasped even the preliminary implications of Joseph’s radical materialism, his investment of every object and element with responsibility to act for itself and for others. it’s not surprising that we have not yet realized the revelation in our gender culture. But I think it’s more than that. It’s not just a matter of time.

Rosalynde Welch

In toppling Plato’s hierarchy of form over matter, Mormonism radically democratizes the cosmos. No longer do the forms hover above gross matter ordering and informing the world. The essential continuity between this world and the realm of spirit means that everything, including the divine, is knowable, available, and resistant in the same basic way. although every object is particular in its configuration. The divine master hierarchy, which sponsored and informed thousands of human vassal hierarchies, has been toppled.

Rosalynde Welch

But crucially, this doesn’t mean that there are no hierarchies in the material world. Indeed, hierarchies can flourish freely. together with alliances and configurations of every kind. It’s just that they’re not inherently oriented and reinforced by the master hierarchy. There’s no realm of the ideal structuring the upward direction. A material cosmos is composed of countless overlapping, competing, and only partially compatible hierarchies.

Rosalynde Welch

No agents are exempt from being a subordinate part of some other agents’ hierarchies. It’s a flat world because everyone is enmeshed in the same messy business of being. But within that world, towers and pinnacles can be built up or down or sideways. Indeed, a material universe that must now include God must in some ways actually be thicker than the one that only had to accommodate human fallen humanity. With God safely off in a discrete spiritual realm. Now that we have to make room for things like glory and eternity and holiness and endlessness within the Mormon material world, we’re going to need a higher ceiling in some ways.

Rosalynde Welch

So by way of example, think of the scene in Ender’s game when Ender Wiggin intuitively grasps that within the game arena, he doesn’t need to think in terms of up or down anymore, right? Any direction can be up. His formations and movements can orient themselves in any direction at all. This opens up vast new realms of imagination and possibility, and it frees him to solve problems and plan maneuvers that seemed impossible in the old fixed orientation. But he still had to invent the maneuvers, right?

Rosalynde Welch

So a thoroughgoing Mormon materialism opens us to a cosmos like Ender’s Arena. We can build in any direction we want. Well, as long as we can enlist other agents to cooperate with our plan, but we still have to invent the maneuvers. That is, gender equality is thinkable in a material world in ways that it just is not in an idealism, but we still have to think it, and then we have to build it. The work of gender equality has only just begun when we choose to embrace the implications of monistic materialism, if we choose to embrace those implications.

Rosalynde Welch

So, Mormonism still has a lot of social and intellectual work ahead of it to achieve the kind of sexual equality mandated in the proclamation in which women and men work together as equal partners. I have no idea what form the work will take. And if you ask me after the talk, I won’t give you an answer. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. And it’s not my role to decide that alone. But I think there is evidence that we’ve begun that work, and I think there are lights ahead pointing the way.

Rosalynde Welch

Mormon material culture is a new and promising line of academic inquiry. And scholars like Jesse Embry and Christine Wright are finding that Mormon women’s authority, to the extent that it has been realized in our past and our present, roots itself in that material culture. Think of the Early Relief Society’s forays into Deseret silkworm culture and grain storage. Think of Amy Brown Lyman, Mormonism’s own progressive era reformer. the General Relief Study President who introduced who pushed for social welfare and introduced women’s health care clinics and maternal health education. Think of Carolyn Pearson. whose poems launch themselves from simple everyday objects toward the great truths of women’s experience.

Rosalynde Welch

To the extent that Mormonism has realized in practice its Distinctive materialist worldview more out of necessity than out of metaphysical commitment, it must be admitted, we see the emergence of women’s native authority in Mormon experience. The Family Proclamation is important because it frames the questions that we’ll have to answer about gender, family, and church structure over the next 100 years. Mormonism’s radical materialism offers one promising route forward. I think we have about ten minutes for questions.

Speaker 4

Kind of a two-part question. Would you apply your account of particularity in in the same perhaps way that you’ve done it to standard Traditional monogamic male-female couplings. Would you apply that to a polygamous situation? And then the second question: would you apply it to a communal situation in which multiple Forms of marriage are communally sanctioned and operating in proximity with each other, such as gay, plural, and monogamic marriages.

Rosalynde Welch

So I’ll try to answer that question. He’s asking me to try to apply this idea of particularity to various other family formations that we see. So I think we can understand all of these different forms as social constructs in certain ways, as particular social constructs arising out of particular historical moments. This a materialist worldview allows us to think to historicize things very deeply without fear of removing the divine from history, right? So I think we can see polygamy. I think we can see monogamy in its various iterations, as I alluded to, and perhaps either other emerging kind of family forms. as all particular social constructs, as material things in certain ways, serving particular ends and particular purposes. The question that we always get to is how do we know what’s true? How do we know if it’s right? Right? If if we have this unlimited Particularity and all this plurality. Well, how can you ever have a concept of what’s right or what’s true?

Rosalynde Welch

And I think the answer is that. We produce truth in the same way that God produced the world. That is, by persuading as many agents to cooperate with our construct as we can, right? But of course, The catch is that in a materialism, it’s not just about persuading humans, right? Because humans are not the only agents. We also have to persuade all the material agents. We have to persuade the biological processes of human nature. We have to persuade. Persuade the atoms, you know, the atoms that produce our universe. So it’s not just a popularity contest among humans, it has to work with The material world as well. We have to see that our plan is enlisting as many agents as possible. And when there’s a robust alliance of agents, both human and and elemental, then I think you have a durable social formation that accomplishes its work in the world. So many. Yeah, Blair. I loved it, by the way. Fantastic.

Speaker 5

And I want to sit and talk with you for like five hours because I have a billion questions. I’m going to narrow it down to one. Okay? So I love your idea about dualism. of genders and complimentary the kind of yin and yang idea. Do you believe that even is there room in your model of this material world to be able to embody that dualism of genders within a single embodiment? Being so many people now identify with genders that are not female or male, whether that’s trans, agender, intersex, whatever. So, is there room in that model for those individuals?

Rosalynde Welch

Yeah. And this is the question I thought about. I yes, you know, every but part of the implications of particularity are that Each individual is an organization of various agents. We’re actually so much more than one single intelligence. We’re all a product of the ideas that we imbibed as children and as the biological processes of our bodies. All of these agents come together to produce one individual. And so every individual is going to be

Rosalynde Welch

particular and thus any um any pairing of individuals is at some level um whether it be um a a romantic or erotic pairing or simply um a A relationship, a friendship, is going to have at its core that particularity or that difference, whether they’re the same gender, whether they identify as intersex, whatever it is. However, I do think that Heterosexual monogamy is a stronger metonym. Metonymically figures The fundamental nature of reality more strongly and more compellingly than other pairings do, which is not to take away from their dignity as human relationships. or the the goodness of the of the care that they provide to one another. But I think it’s in the stark difference of the male and the female coming together that we most clearly See the irreducible difference at the core of human experience. So I would So I would say yes, there was absolutely room for it. And yet, I believe that heterosexual marriage still plays a special symbolic role in what I’ve described here. Yeah, Chris.

Speaker 1

So, you know, John, you mentioned earlier about the origins of the NTA somewhat in early American Pragmatism Reading Club, right? This actually reminds me quite a bit of like Charles Peirce, for whom categories are The particular is what is real, and the categories emerge. We create them, as you say, as we explore, and the truth is sort of the eventual end product of this process, right, by which we do this. That suggests to me that when we speak of gender as a term, when we speak of gender dimorphism, that that really is sort of rooted in the historical, and that it doesn’t necessarily point. us in the same direction in the future. As we persuade, as the communities work together, that future path of gender may look different. One question that I had, though, when you Speak of gender as a metonym? Are you speaking particularly of gender as a metonym for particularity itself? Yes. And if so, I’m curious what work gender is doing that. And it’s similar to that by particular parents.

Rosalynde Welch

Yeah, I think it enacts it, right? It enacts it in an inescapable way. As mammals, we are primed to be aware of gender difference in very visceral and immediate ways. So I think it it’s it’s it again, we’re in a world of metonyms. So it’s not that that that gender is uniquely or qualitatively different than other kinds of conditions. It’s just a matter of gradation or degree. I think it embodies particularity and enacts that particularity to a greater degree than any number of other types of conditions, relations configurations that we could think of. So um I I think it’s just uh the the the um the nature of um the nature of human sexual reproduction and it its its central, you know, its central role in the material world as we know it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Randy, yeah.

Speaker 6

Um I I learning Greek years ago, I remember that Greek had a dyadic form of grammar that is we just we don’t use, right? Have that third form, but it seems to me that there’s a difference between particularity and uniqueness in its massive, literally infinite differentiation, and a diadem where. I used to fool around with my friends and say, well, in my world, we’re going to have sex between eight people before anybody gets pregnant. And when you think about doing something like that, you know, who do you look at? Love at that moment. It’s dyad in our current conception, anyhow. The dyad itself creates the awareness of that difference. Otherwise, it kind of gets fogged out. So I would ask. you if gender for you has a dyadic aspect to it of particularity that general particularity doesn’t have. That our conceptions of gender are socially constructed.

Rosalynde Welch

So, and that’s okay, we don’t need to worry about that, right? We can recognize emerging new constructions of gender that include transgender and intersex, you know. Um but we don’t need to worry that um that humanity is just gonna go off the rails um and get uh you know, and come up with something totally crazy because the material world is part of this. Too, right? We are tethered as materialists to human nature in an inescapable way. So I think that, you know. the the the molecular processes that make up the human being are gonna exercise a type of break on um on innovation. Um at the same time, they’ll spur other types of innovation, right? That’s what this material world that we Think of it: we can’t predict where it’s going to go or where it’s going to go next.

Rosalynde Welch

We can’t, but we can never escape from the material world. And we have to always take it into account and persuade it to go along with our schemes as well. So, I think that. We can say that the dyad is currently a part of our social construction, but at the same time, the nature of sexual reproduction Two gametes coming together, right? That’s not something that we’re ever going to be able to move beyond or transcend, right? That’s part of the material world. We’re part of it too. Now, I’m speaking to a bunch of transhumanists. I just saw all your eyebrows go up, right? And here I’m revealing how I’m really not a Mormon. So let’s put it this way. We can’t take it for granted that it will be a simple thing to transcend gamete to gamete reproduction. And yeah, so I’ll leave it at that. I think we are out of time. Yes.