ABSTRACT
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (Mormons) belief in a female deity, Heavenly Mother, challenges Judeo-Christian orthopraxy of an exclusively male-occupied pantheon. For Mormon congregations, the embodiment of a celestial family – God the Father, Heavenly Mother and their son, Jesus Christ – positions biological essentialism as divine, relationships as heteronormative and women as eternal mothers. If Mother in Heaven is defined by female reproduction, this suggests that fertility is a measure of how Mormon women are valued in their communities. Scholarship on Mormon female embodiment has centred on the way that the institutional church valorises the female reproductive body and idealises families. However, if fertility is central to the meaning of Mormon female bodies by being a tangible manifestation of religious orthopraxis, how do Mormon childless women find a place in the Mormon discourse? Drawing upon my research on British Mormon women, I discuss how Mormon women navigate infertility through three distinctive strategies: as a trial of faith, re-interpreting the lexicon of motherhood and eternal reproductive body. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways that childless Latter-day Saint women are embodied in dominant Mormon constructions on procreation in intimate, institutional and doctrinal spaces.
