The “My Online Friends” Religious Enclave: Expanding the Definition and Possibilities of Enclaved Discourses

ABSTRACT

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

Notes

1. I appreciate RR reviewers Brian Fehler’s and Lisa Shaver’s time and thoughtful comments, as well as Haivan Hoang’s continued generosity and insights, all of which pushed my thinking and helped me produce much better work.

2. While I did not ask the MOF founders their reasons for restricting membership to women, they may have drawn on the precedent set by their membership in the LDS Church’s women’s organization, called the Relief Society, which is a literacy and religious society that has existed since 1842. Although the MOF women moved to a private board mainly to avoid trolling from those pretending to be members of their faith, they also took advantage of the separation from the official sponsorship of their religion. The Relief Society has historically played an important role in both upholding the LDS Church’s understanding of gender and, in the Relief Society’s earlier days, expanding those understandings to give women a more public and more equal role with men in the LDS church (see Derr). However, in the post-Depression and post-World War II era, changes in the Relief Society resulted in a narrower understanding of what it means to be an LDS woman (Derr). While the LDS Church itself and women within the church have again begun expanding this understanding in the past two decades, the MOF women also sometimes used their enclaved discussion board to negotiate subject positions and identities different than those found in church doctrine. The MOF board was therefore a safe space both from a critical public outside their religion and from sometimes critical voices within their religion. In the women’s use of the board and in their initial restriction on gender, the “complex interdependence of the vernacular and institutional,” as discussed by Howard (“Vernacular Web”) can be seen. These discussions, however, are outside the scope of this paper.

3. I alluded to this in the above footnote.

4. Excerpts are unedited.

5. This discussion is outside the scope of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Matthews Pavia

Catherine Matthews Pavia is an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University and a parent of four young children. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include digital literacies, religious literacies, circulation studies, and archival research on rural women’s literacies.