Navigating Religious and Gender Normativities and Identities in Mexico City

My project explored the production and experience of masculinities among Mormon men in the contemporary context of Mexico City. It draws on a qualitative methodology, based on the analysis of texts and documents that make up the institutional normativity and discourse of Mormonism; ethnographic observations of two traditional Mormon congregations and the collective of self-identified LGBT Mormons Afirmación; and individual in-depth interviews with 25 Mormon men and 5 Mormon women. Drawing on the debates on secularisation and detraditionalisation, I argue that contemporary Mormon masculinities in Mexico are neither merely current manifestations of ‘traditional’ forms of religious masculinity, nor the product of the ever increasing ‘modernisation’ and secularisation of Mexican society. Rather, they consist of nuanced and fluid processes that simultaneously display elements of long standing religious and gendered belief and practice, as well as ways of being in the world and interacting in it influenced by what can be seen as modern and post-modern discourses. Such processes were traced in four dimensions, namely, the display of masculinities in different spaces configured either by Mormonism’s gender regime or other such regime(s), the particular positions assigned to masculinities in those regimes through the notion of priesthood authority, the gender relationships that such structure produces, fosters and/or hinders, and the biographical accounts that participants articulated of their becoming ‘Mormon men’.

About the Speaker: Ali Siles is a full time researcher at the Centre for Gender Research and Studies (CIEG) of the National University of Mexico. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. His research has focused on masculinities in interaction with other forms of social structuring, identity, and subjectivity (such as 'race', class, or religion). He is the author of the fore coming book Double masculinities: Mormon men and gender/religious normativities, and has published academic articles on topics such as masculinity, fatherhood, family life, personal and emotional relationships, and religion. He is currently working on a project on masculinities and gender relations within a university context in Mexico City.