This paper explores the thorny mingling of law with qualitative social science methodologies through the lens of the 2010–11 Supreme Court of British Columbia Charter Reference on polygamy, which was conducted to determine whether the criminalization of polygamy was consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Reference reveals how the marginalization of qualitative research(ers) effectively controlled whose voices were to be heard and whose were to be silenced in the broader project of sovereign intervention into family formation. With specific focus on Professor Angela Campbell, who provided expert opinion testimony in the Reference, this paper reflects on two important questions: when social science is invoked in legal settings, whose knowledge is legitimized, and who benefits from this legitimization? Drawing upon the longstanding feminist project of deconstructing assumptions of value-neutrality in all science, this paper considers how qualitative, feminist research(ers) may be inherently at odds with law’s quest for (rational) “truth.”

In 2014 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) updated their official website to include information about the polygamy/polyandry practiced by Joseph Smith, their founder and prophet, and his many wives. The admission by the LDS Church reconciles the tension between information that had become readily available online since the 1990s and church-sanctioned narratives that obscured Smith’s polygamy while concurrently focusing on the polygyny of Brigham Young, Smith’s successor. This paper entwines queer theory with Robert Proctor’s concept of agnotology—a term used to describe the epistemology of ignorance, to consider dissent from two interrelated perspectives: 1) how dissent from feminists and historians within the LDS Church challenged (mis)constructions of Mormon history, and; 2) how the Mormon practice of polygamy in the late nineteenth century dissented from Western sexual mores that conflated monogamy with Whiteness, democracy and social progression in the newly formed American Republic.