Hi everyone! I have been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to update you on the status of my summer research and to tell you more about the greater impact of what I am trying to accomplish with my honors in the major thesis! For an update, I am now home from Salt Lake City, Utah, but my work isn’t done yet. I have had the opportunity to connect with several queer women from the Salt Lake Valley, and I am continuing to schedule interviews with many more queer LDS women despite my return to Florida. Zoom has been incredibly helpful in my interviewing process, as I have found that most people prefer to meet over that format due to hectic lives and busy schedules. I am delighted by the overwhelming number of responses and support for my research topic! It has been outrageously empowering to speak with other women who can empathize with me and each other about the beautiful (and ugly) sides of living authentically queer amidst a religious tradition and culture that is less-than-accepting.
In the conversations I have had with queer LDS women, the topic of the impact of my research seems to arise frequently. The women I speak to mention often how necessary my research is for the female queer community, the LDS community, and the queer LDS community. I reveal my motives to my participants just as often. There is a disparaging lack of academic literature and conversation around the existence and experiences of queer Mormon women. I took an interest in understanding how queer Mormon women reconciled their religious identities and their queer existence because I was seeking the same answers for myself. Disappointingly, I could find hardly a mention of the female queer LDS experience in any database or archive out there. I knew queer LDS women existed because I was a living testament to that possibility.
Therefore, the impact of my research is twofold: I so desperately wanted to find other women who experienced some of the same religious realities that I did, and I wanted to provide an academic platform for queer women who have lived the realities of Mormonism to voice their experiences, their hardships, their gripes, their grievances, their “ah-ha!” moments, their failures, their triumphs, and everything in between. As cliché as it sounds, I want to find myself in the queer women I interview, and I want them to find their stories in academia. I feel extremely lucky to be the mouthpiece for the women I interview because it’s their turn to be heard. But that’s enough of the sappiness! I am looking forward to continuing to conduct interviews and eventually transcribe them. I have taken so much from the stories I have heard, and I know analyzing their themes will be even more enlightening. Till next time!
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