research on anti-feminist online Mormonism referenced in Salt Lake Tribune column

I enjoy reading Natalie Brown’s columns for the Salt Lake Tribune, so it was a real honor that she referenced research that Amy Chapman and I did on the “DezNat” Twitter movement in last Saturday’s installment. In particular, Brown referenced a comment I made to the Tribune last summer that our findings highlighted anti-feminist influences on the DezNat movement (which has typically been criticized for its far right influences) and that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

has encouraged members to take steps against racism and has condemned white nationalism and political violence, it’s harder to tell whether the church would disapprove of the aggressive stances on gender and sexuality that we saw in our posts.

As a whole, the column focuses on the need for safe online forums for Latter-day Saint women, using Amy and my DezNat research as supporting evidence for that argument, and is well worth a read. Personally (and professionally), I appreciate the way that it points to the way that feminism and Mormon women’s concerns more broadly are core to online Mormonism. Whenever I start a new manuscript talking about online Mormonism, I frequently trace the phenomenon back to Joanna Brooks’s observation that after institutional action against Mormon feminists in the 1990s, the early Web provided a safe haven for those discussions to continue. I don’t think it’s possible to understand online Mormonism without taking gender into account—and yet, I’m confident that I’ve still missed important parts of that in my own work. Brown’s column is not just a validation of research I’ve already done but an invitation to be more attentive in future work.

• macro
• Work
• media appearances
• DezNat
• Amy Chapman
• Natalie Brown
• Mormon Land
• online Mormonism
• Mormon Twitter
• Joanna Brooks