Date of Award

3-2024

Author's School

College of Arts & Sciences

Author's Program

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (A.B.)

Restricted/Unrestricted

Unrestricted = Publicly available

Abstract

This study investigates purity expectations directed towards girls and women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), approaching a largely underresearched topic and establishing findings such as the mutual embeddedness of purity and gender-based violence for girls and women in the LDS Church. Through a discourse analysis, this study creates a historical timeline of over 100 years of documents, including church-produced media as well as separate writings by LDS women, focusing on how purity has changed and has been politicized over time within various historical moments. While most survey participants in this study described never having heard a conversation about gender-based violence in church settings, participants in the interviews distinguished between rarely discussing specific terminology of gender-based violence and recognizing themes of gender-based violence in LDS purity, such as lessons on how immodesty or impurity would lead to certain “dangers.” Participants’ discussions of direct and/or proximal experiences with gender-based violence — with 42% of interview participants describing a direct experience with gender violence despite this study’s initial flier asking only about interest in discussing LDS purity — reveal the embedded role purity expectations play in these experiences and suggest significant prevalence of gender-based violence among LDS girls and women. Future research should focus on specific dynamics of LDS purity expectations and gender-based violence touched on in this study, such as body image, racial aspects of purity, lack of trauma-informed systems, and dynamics of LDS purity for queer girls and women.

Mentor

Jami Ake

Additional Advisors

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, R. Marie Griffith

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