When Sonia Johnson was excommunicated in December 1979, she became a media spectacle. She was excommunicated in relation to her activities opposing the activism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). One observer described the excommunication and its aftermath as “perhaps the most conspicuous media event in [LDS] church history.”1 The primary theorist of the concept of spectacle, Guy Debord, developed the framing to analyze modern social life in the age of mass consumption and mass media. Debord described how, especially after the invention of advertising, forms of mass communication created images, communicated ideas, ideals, and images, and sold commodities to large portions of the population. Debord called the resulting culture “the society of the spectacle,” in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”2 The society of the spectacle was the context in which the LDS...
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Research Article|
January 01 2025
Spectacular Mormon Politics: Sonia Johnson and the ERA in “The Society of the Spectacle”
Christine Talbot
Christine Talbot
Christine Talbot is professor of gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado. She is the author of A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852–1890, published in 2013, and has published shorter essays on gender and the new commercial entertainments in the early twentieth century and a comparative analysis of early anti-polygamy and antislavery literature. Her most recent project, Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, was published in August 2024.
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Mormon Studies Review (2025) 12: 25–34.
Citation
Christine Talbot; Spectacular Mormon Politics: Sonia Johnson and the ERA in “The Society of the Spectacle”. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2025; 12 25–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/21568030.12.04
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