This article examines how 20 female college students who identified as members of the Church of JesusChrist of Latter-day Saints (LDS) negotiated its gender ideology to legitimate their educational goals. The young LDS women creatively employed equality, professionalism, and essentialist discourses to craft a coherent identity as a "good LDS woman" that incorporated their pursuit of higher education. Beyond providing an in-depth look at how college-age LDS women "do gender," the analysis informs our understanding of the persistence of women's participation in patriarchal religious institutions, the process of women's resistance, and women's role in the negotiated process of hegemony. The authors argue that while women embrace the LDS gender ideology of womanhood, their pursuit of higher education is a form of resistance-embedded resistance-often neglected by scholars. The findings suggest the importance of nomos and meaning in understanding women's participation in and manipulation of patriarchal religious institutions.As individuals "do" and "accomplish" gender (West and Zimmerman 1987), they are assisted, directed, and constrained by the ideology and practice of gendered institutions (Acker 1990) that define forms of behavior as gender appropriate or inappropriate, a process Zuckerman (1997) referred to as gender regulation. Women's resistance to gender regulation was often invisible to researchers when an androcentric conception of resistance, consisting of activities occurring in the public sphere, was used. However, feminist scholars have challenged this narrow 404 AUTHORS' NOTE: We are most appreciative of the young Latter-day Saints women who shared their perceptions, experiences, and beliefs with us. We wish to thank our research assistants, Emily Sly and Holly Riedelbach, for their help with interviewing and Karen Hallgren, Christine Bose, and several anonymous reviewers for their keen editorial eyes and helpful comments on this article.
This article contributes to research on public attitudes toward science, specifically science distrust, by analyzing responses from focus group interviews conducted in the U.S. state of Idaho. Idahoans share a collective cultural identity that values self-sufficiency, independence, and conservative suspicion of government. Content analysis of focus group transcripts from 12 urban and rural communities across Idaho show that regulatory science evokes the highest levels of distrust among participants, as they threaten economic livelihoods and Idahoans’ collective identification with independence and the industries on which Idaho’s economy was built.
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