Review
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Title: The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender
Editors: Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petrey
Publisher: Routledge
Genre: Religious Non-fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 628
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781032336268
Price: $56.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender is a dense, wide-ranging, thoughtful edited collection of essays. Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petrey bring together a wide array of scholars to highlight a diverse set of approaches to the intersection of Mormonism and gender. The book is divided into 4 sections, with a total of 41 individual chapters. The four sections are methodological issues, historical approaches, social scientific approaches, and theological approaches.
While the collection is wide-ranging, and each essay is fairly accessible to an outside, non-expert reader, the core audience of the book is folks doing an academic study of Mormonism and/or gender. Lay readers may indeed find particular essays and sections valuable and worthwhile but may feel somewhat intimidated by the sheer size of the book and the dense academic layout of the chapters. This is not to discourage anyone interested in the book but to help readers prepare appropriately to get the most out of their reading (or look elsewhere if this isn’t quite what you’re looking for).
However, for those interested in engaging the world of Mormonism and gender and wanting fairly brief primers on a wide variety of subjects, it’s hard to imagine a better book than the one Hoyt and Petrey have put together. Each essay concludes with any necessary explanatory notes, references, and a further reading section. In addition to this wealth of resources, many of the essays conclude by drawing attention to current gaps in the field and suggest further areas of inquiry. For any young scholars looking for ways into the rich scholarly conversation surrounding Mormonism and gender, this book is invaluable.
The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender will likely work best in a couple of ways. First, as a handy reference for addressing a variety of questions about Mormonism and gender. Readers can read an essay or two as they feel inclined, moving at will throughout the book. Second, as mentioned above, as a resource for those with a scholarly interest in the field—providing bibliographies to raid, guides for future research, and a wealth of provocative and thoughtful approaches and claims to challenge, extend, or complicate.
Two of the book’s strengths are the interdisciplinary nature of its contributors and the way it often places two or more essays on similar topics next to each other. The interdisciplinary nature of the contributors brings essays on art, Mormon literature, queer organizing, a wide array of historical subjects, theological subjects, and social science topics into the same volume. This diversity of approaches enriches the conversation and offers new insights that may be lost if the focus remained more narrowly on any one of them.
This diversity of approach and commitment to a polyvocal final product also manifests in the multiple essays on similar topics next to each other (two notable examples being polygamy and queerness). These essays often cover some of the same facts or historical events, yet often draw attention to different elements of them. The productive tension created by this reminds readers that each contributor is offering their own interpretation of events, texts, or data and that there is room for readers to reinterpret some of that same material. I love it when an edited collection works to highlight rather than smooth over the productive tensions and divergences among its contributors.
Any aspiring or young scholar of gender and/or Mormonism should absolutely pick up The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender. As should any readers interested in brief, academically rigorous primers on a wide array of subjects found in the intersection of Mormonism and gender. Hoyt and Petrey’s book gathers a remarkable diversity of thought on and approaches to Mormonism and gender into one place, laying the foundations for future study. I can’t wait to see how scholars, artists, and writers extend, complicate, and challenge the conclusions presented here. The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender is a monumental achievement.