Posted by:
Elder Berry
(
)
Date: October 21, 2021 11:35AM
In reply to this.
https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2399648,2400024#msg-2400024I don't know if Peter Coviello is Mormon or not. Probably not. So he isn't one of Mormonism's folk at their fringe. My bad. His curriculum vitae doesn't scream Mormon. He is apparently more like Jan Shipps.
And I haven't read his book. But the reviews I have read aren't leading me to it.
I don't understand how you think he has written anything of value for exMormons?
"But even here, Coviello’s theoretical structure might take him a step too far. At issue is the fact that the women who participated in polygamy consistently and nearly univocally described their experiences in non-carnal terms. Coviello engages this—almost exclusively through Zina Huntington’s tale, who shouldn’t be taken as representative—by explaining that their reminiscences were written decades later, and that their justifications in fact represent their embracing the secular discourse of monogamy (thus making them “reluctant” polygamists). But besides overlooking earlier accounts—we do have women’s voices in the 1840s and 1850s, after all—I fear that theorizing women’s accounts to mean their opposite could be another form of silencing, an ironic and unfortunate extension of the patriarchal system itself. I’m reluctant, then, to embrace an interpretive strategy that does not let the women speak for themselves."
https://benjaminepark.com/2020/01/27/mormonism-as-the-hinge-upon-which-secularism-pivots/