June 2026 Journey
May and June have passed into the nether nights. This one was a little more difficult for me because I ended law school finals the last week of May, had a week to write some stuff for a conference, and then jumped into a course on space law. I’ve also had to spend much of the month revising an article that got peer reviewed, so much of my reading and thinking space revolved around gender and Mormonism and space and the law.
Projects Past Future
Andor/Orwell Chapter
My chapter in Andor Analysed for Red Futures was published, which is exciting! In “A Far Time Ago in a Galaxy Long, Long Away: Andor and Orwell,” I look at George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), which reflects on his time as a rebel fighter in Spain, and the rebellion in Star Wars: Andor. I argue that while Orwell fought for a socialist future, Andor’s rebellion branches in its approach (Andor’s, Rael’s, Garrera’s, and Mothma’s), and a comparison reveals that the Star Wars rebellion, at its heart, is not similar to the progressive rebellion many want it to be but rather is a rebellion that seeks to reassert its pre-imperial, capitalist, democratic values—values supported by the entrenched and privileged Rebel Council and not the people themselves.
It will eventually be uploaded online here.
The Storming Journey Podcast
Good news from this month: the podcast I co-host with El Call and Liz Busby won the Association for Mormon Letters best podcast award! Really grateful for the promise that the awards committee saw in our little podcast and what we’re trying to do for Mormon studies.
S1E28 - Cultural Differences: Learn, Observe, Integrate (WOK, Interludes 4-6)
The interludes are such a fun, difficult problem—we group them up into a set and then try to reach each of them through our chosen theme. El and I have both found them difficult to think through a single theme with, but we all have a fun conversation anyway.
S1E29 - Reason: Persuasion and Argument (WOK, Ch. 29)
I love talking about scholarship. I think it’s one of the things that attracts me to Sanderson: he knows how to capture the experience of scholarship on a page so well.
S1E30 - Equivocate: Constraints on the Social Contract (WOK, Ch. 30)
I love picking random words for the theme—or, rather, words that one may not immediately connect to “sacred reading.” Hence, the word equivocate.
S1E31 - Qualm: Care, Community, Duty, Responsibility (WOK, Ch. 31-32)
I think this is one of our best episodes. We really dive into the layers of Lirin and Kaladin. I also love that we start getting a little more into the Book of Mormon and the relationship of those stories to the Stormlight Archive.
S1E32 - Evidence: The Broken Soulcaster (WOK, Ch. 33)
I love the discussions we’ve been having about God and thinking about the ideas of God in relation to Sanderson’s books. I find Sanderson to be a really great thinker about what it might actually mean to exist for eternity, so talking about God in relation to Way of Kings has been such an illuminating experience.
MHA Presentation Reading
I gave a presentation at the Mormon History Association conference in May. I titled it “Listening, Learning, Loving: A Literary History of LGBTQ+ Books Published by Cedar Fort.” This presentation was part of a project that has spent a lot of time on the back burner, with law school and the PhD taking up most of the front burner with a few other projects, but I’m able to squeeze a conference here and there looking at Mormon/LGBTQ+ books published. I find the genre to be a fascinating one—filled with sincerity, temerity, and sanguinity, along with a healthy dose of trauma. What’s a world without trauma?
For this project, I worked through the following:
Richard Ostler’s Listen, Learn, and Love trilogy. Most of the first book is prevalent to this project, but the others are good approaches. I find it fascinating when Latter-day Saints have to place their frameworks for the future of the Church under the guise of improving culture—not gospel or theology.
Meghan Decker, Tender Leaves of Hope. Out of all the LGBTQ+ books published by Cedar Fort, I found this one to be the most moving. Maybe it’s because Decker’s experience is far from mine, so I don’t have as many quibbles about it … but I found Decker’s approach to be sincere and theological valuable. It engaged not just with the culture of Mormonism but its theological bones. And it made those bones sing in new ways. As I said at the MHA conference, I do wish she, along with Sorensen, below, would do more with their unique identities, by which I mean actually consider the existence of someone attracted to the same sex and in a marriage with someone of the opposite sex to be something different than lesbian or gay—I think that broadness to queerness approach would open so much new knowledge and discussion. Decker almost gets at that with her formulation of being a woman attracted to just one man, her husband, and a whole lotta women … but I wanted more thoughts on that uniqueness. Because it is a unique identity—one that I cannot understand.
In the same vein, Skyler Sorensen’s Exclude Not Thyself: Thriving as a Covenant-Keeping Gay Latter-day Saint failed on that consideration of something new and fell into a political polemic against a leftist queer agenda rather than a deep, thoughtful consideration of what it truly means in Mormon soteriology, eschatology, anthropology, and theology to be a man sexually attracted to other men but married to a woman with whom children have been produced. It’s a fascinating intersection that, while I do not agree nor encourage people to take it, should be theorized and thought about more.
Dennis Schleicher’s Is He Nuts: Why a Gay Man Would Become a Member of the Church of Jesus Christ. I don’t think I have more to say beyond what I wrote in a review for the Association of Mormon Letters.
Becky Mackintosh, Love Boldly: Embracing Your LGBTQ Loved Ones and Your Faith. I read this a number of years ago, and I had forgotten how much juggling Mackintosh puts in about her relationship and identity in relation to her son coming out. It’s short and punchy, and falls into the category of the only answer being the love more—but there’s always something there in its simplicity (even if it is also the most complex thing in the world).
Mike Ramsey, My Dad’s a Muslim, My Mom’s a Lesbian, and I’m a Latter-day Saint. This is tertiary to the project. Ramsey isn’t gay; rather, he tries to understand his mother, who is lesbian; his father, who is Muslim and not in his life; and his upbringing in Idaho. The book tells of his overcoming his hatred for homosexuality because of how his community treated him due to his mom’s choices—which is an intriguing premise and Ramsey delivers on a fine memoir. But it doesn’t go beyond the cultural treatment of him, which I always find unfortunate in so many Mormon memoirs.
Mormon Data Article
When I started at Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, it was rather difficult to find everything within its archive. So, I set out to form a simple spreadsheet of all the articles, poems, stories, reviews, etc. that were contained in the archive. Well, I didn’t stop with Dialogue… I did it for eight other journals—BYU Studies, Journal of Mormon History, John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, Sunstone, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Mormon Studies Review, Interpreter, and FAIR.
Because of that, I’ve been working with the data for an article, which is currently under review. The first reviewer wanted more history, context, and theory in the article, so… I went and read the following (not all commented on):
Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? A foundational text in understanding why it is important to think about lived experience in the creation of knowledge.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History
Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education
Francine D. Blau, Mary C. Brinton, and David B. Grusky, The Declining Significance of Gender?
Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family
Is Academic Feminism Dead?: Theory in Practice
Rosanna Hertz, Nancy L. Marshall, Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home
Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results
Kathleen Gerson, The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America
Katherine Kearns, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory: The Search for Critical Method
Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Such a good argument for feminism and history—almost, alllllmost, convinced me of the patriarchy argument. But stellar and foundational nonetheless.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family
Amy Westervelt, Forget “Having It All”: How American Messed Up Motherhood—And How to Fix It
Ann-Louise Shapiro, Feminists Revision History
Clair Brown, Gender in the Workplace
Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture
Ruth Enid Zambrana, Toxic Ivory Towers: The Consequences of Work Stress on Underrepresented Minority Faculty
Robert Max Jackson, Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status
Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism
Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women
Alessandra Tanesini, An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies
Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Feminist Thought. This one was wild to read because some former reader really wanted their ideas about Clough to be seen, so they wrote them in the marginalia. I think I enjoyed their comments and “takes” on feminism the most. Sometimes library books can be fun.
Janet Holland and Caroline Ramazanoglu, Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. A nice introduction to feminism as a methodology.
Nancy A. Naples, Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research. If you haven’t heard of Naples or read her work, and you’re in feminism, stop everything and go do. I find her texts to be rather invigorating and filled with a plethora of rabbit holes that delight. She’s also the most delightful person.
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life. A return, yet again, to Ahmed.
Dissertation Reading
I did get to a little bit of dissertation reading, which has been nice. The good thing about summer is there’s more time and less daily responsibilities. The bad thing about summer is there’s more time and less daily responsibilities.
Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower, and Kindred graphic novels.
Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling. Fledgling is Butler’s last book to write before her untimely passing, and it’s a difficult book to read. It’s not a capstone to a career; it’s the beginning of something new. Her biographers Gerry Canavan (Octavia E. Butler) and Susanna Morris (Positive Obsession) agree that Fledgling was written because she needed time away from the third Parable book (Parable of the Trickster), which had some written on it but hit a snag. In Fledgling, you get a woman who wakes up with no memory and then discovers that she’s a hybrid vampire who must gather followers around her in order to survive. This yearning for community sings across Butler’s work, but here, one can see it crescendoing into something more—something more that we’ll never get. So, Fledgling is both a wonderful book in and of itself, a tentative whisper toward something we will never get, and something that encapsulates many of the questions Butler kept asking over her novels.
Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction.
Readings Future Past
A People’s History of These Truths
I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and followed it up with Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States. In the fall, I’m teaching a US Literature Since 1880 course, so I’m trying to find historical, contextual nodes to attach to the various books, stories, and poems we’re going to be looking at.
Reading these two together, though, was a perfect mixture of bottom and top energy. Zinn’s book is very much an attempt to try to tell the story of the United States from the bottom up, while Lepore’s is from the top down. This makes sense: a people’s history is about the people and is its own form of historiography, while Lepore is a political historian, focused on the movers and shakers. It really does matter from where you look and from where you perch when it comes to how history solidifies, stretches, simpers…
I’m reading more history books because for the last year I’ve been spending a lot of time with historians. And one thing historians will make a literary scholar hunger for is more reading. I’m always so amazed at how quickly and how voluminously they all can read… I thought I read a lot, but historians have so much more on me.
Communion
Yes, I took a crack at J. D. Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. It was not as well written as Hillbilly Elegy (which I wish I could’ve returned to, but alas, time is fraught), but it brought with it the general earnestness by which Vance approaches life.
In the book, he talks about how he’s now vice president which means the meritocratic sycophancy that drove his career—from joining the military to get out of poverty to Yale law school to venture capitalist to senator—is done. Meritocracy no longer exists—at least for him. But that’s the thing about these mindsets: they don’t leave us. How we’re raised, how we go through life—it affects us. And it continues to affect us. And where a book, a memoir, might be a place to think through that, Vance doesn’t quite give us that. His distaste for therapy but his love for the repentant aspects of Catholicism were fascinating, especially when he doesn’t lead the reader through that spiritual cleansing of what is ailing him. I want more, but that more is kept from me, veiled.
I was rather unnerved by his dedication toward a Christian civilization and his depiction of civilizational decay. And I was flatly annoyed with his declaration of wanting to be a Christian statesman yet not taking seriously that a Christian statesman should stand up to the politics of his day—no matter what. That’s what makes a Christian statesman Christian. After all, that’s what Christ did. Stood up to the politics of the day. Got crucified for it. Didn’t bend. Huh.
All Systems Red
Oh, Murderbot. What more can I say? Such delight, such connection, such care. If you need an enjoyable ride of a mystery, Martha Wells’s All Systems Red, if you haven’t read it yet (or even if you have), is a good go to.
Otherworldly Delights
Another Supreme Court session ended with a big bang. One of my goals for law school was to gain the ability to read the opinions as they came out and grasp their legal significance (or at least a general understanding of the legal significance… it always takes more than one read to grasp more of the significance than that). I was able to do that this time around, which was a lot of fun. I also am always grateful for the analysis from Strict Scrutiny and Amicus, weekly podcast listening in this household.
I really enjoyed watching X-Men ‘97 and am very excited for the second season. I will always get the theme song of the ‘90s X-Men into my head at random times, and this is such a good follow-up to the series. The same over-the-top-ness, but also I’m crying through half the episodes because they just twinge the heartstrings in such little time.
I got the game Mystic Moon from Unstable Games, and I’ve played it a few times and have enjoyed it. The game is a puzzle game mixed with a random element—oh, and did I mention the cats wanting to be witches? There are cats wanting to be witches. Need I say more?
I saw Masters of the Universe in theaters. I wanted this movie to be so much better than it was. I think I agree with Leah Shnelbach’s review that the movie needed to commit to something—epic fantasy or high falutent fun. I also wanted it to reflect the epic that we got in Netflix’s He-Man: Revelation and He-Man: Revolution, which I thoroughly enjoy.
Tomorrow Another Day
In the next month, I need to write a chapter of my dissertation (on Octavia E. Butler) along with two chapters for a cosmere collection (on Elantris and on the podcast). I also need to spend July prepping my course on Feminism and Science Fiction (which means reading through the corpus and prepping notes and class time). So, there’s a lot of reading when it comes to eugenics, Butler, Sanderson, and feminism in my future. Should be a fun time.
