Dragging History: Mormonism and the Haunted House of U.S. Exceptionalism

This discussion of Danny Gellersen’s paper, “A Peculiar People: Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging at the Intersection of a Psychoanalyst’s Werk and Identity,” picks up and complicates the language of “the peculiar,” which has been a historically enduring way of referring to Mormons, both as a term of derision and as a form of positive self-identification. In a nutshell: Mormon peculiarity cuts many ways and has never been innocent of relations of power. Building off of K. Mohrman’s book-length study of “Mormon peculiarity discourse,” Pellegrini suggests that this politically ambivalent history of Mormon peculiarity may return to haunt Gellersen’s work with their patient Easton, their use of reverie in that treatment, and the analytic work they hope to do with and through drag performance.