Armstrong describes the first time she uses the word “fuck”.

On March 12, 1997, ten minutes after opening a rejection letter from the admissions of one of BYU’s graduate programs, I stood up next to the open window of my bedroom and shouted, “FUCK!” for the first and most precious time of my life. It was a euphoric rebirth, a ceremonial exit from the womb and refutation of everything that had tethered me to what I now regard as mythical nonsense.

It’s worth noting the language about rebirth and the untethering of the self from the power operating within the church.

Here’s a fascinating entry relating to Armstrong’s account of her first kiss. It combines a number of elements anticipated in Foucault. First, the post contains a quote from a letter Armstrong sent to a friend. Foucault would probably read this as a hupomnema or perhaps more accurately as correspondence. Letter writing is an important technology of the self in Foucault’s technologies of the self. Second, the account documents a limit moment where Armstrong’s bodily experience lead to the creation of new limits. She uses this experience as a source of reflection on her various relationships with power. Finally, she refers to her conscience at play as a result of the experience, a move anticipated in Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity.

Here is a quote from the post:

David kissed me in I guess what he would consider sensual fury, what I
would consider beastly uncoordination. At about midnight I pulled out of his
driveway never to see him again, well, never to see him for a long, long time. I
was really messed up from the experience even though all we did was smooch. In
the eyes of the Church, I thought, I must be a heathen, a stiffnecked wayward, a
virtual Lamanite. For about three months I lingered on the brink of
self-destruction. David was gone forever far far away in a land called Caltech.
My innocence was gone forever far far away with Nirvana as my only
witness.

And then Armstrong reflects on her subjectivity at the time:

And then I remembered just how distraught I was at that first kiss, how I seriously thought I was going to hell because my tongue had entered another human being’s mouth for purposes other than life support. And I so totally and completely don’t want my daughter to ever have to go through that sort of self-loathing.

So I’m going to keep this letter — a single-spaced account of my whole sexual non-history from ages 14-18 that is written in one whole paragraph and stretches over seven pages — and hope that when the time comes I’ll be able to teach my daughter about making healthy personal decisions about sex and about relationships, and about never using the word “uncoordination” because it DOESN’T EXIST.

Here’s a striking post from Heather Armstrong which begins to address the intersection between power and sexuality. Whilst Armstrong’s observations amount to a candid dislike of the Mormon church along human rights lines, her post opens up issues of how pastoral power is used in conjunction with the creation of sexual identities.

I prefer not to use such long quotes, however the manner in which Armstrong connects homosexuality, polygamy, and monogamy as a problematic for relationships of power within the church is rather striking. What is also worthy of note is the way Armstrong here carefully renegotiates a new boundary to her subject position. In previous posts she stepped back from saying anything overtly political about the church, but here she is directly critical and asserts a position whilst reinforcing a subject position that is respectful to her parents beliefs as practicing Mormons.

A can of worms | dooce ®:

“Mormons believe that polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife, and what I can’t help thinking is that when the civil right of marriage is ultimately extended to homosexuals and then to polygamists, why wouldn’t the Mormon Church start practicing it again? And when they do start practicing it again, how are the members of the church going to handle it? If Mormons truly believe their religion they have to believe that polygamy is their destiny, so why are they always trying to distance themselves from it? I think that many of them don’t want to ask themselves that question because they might be terrified of the answer: they aren’t okay with it.

It was this very issue that started me on my way out of the religion, this issue and that of the role of women in the church. I realized that I valued myself too much to ever be okay with sharing my partner with anyone else. I deserve all of him, and he deserves all of me, nothing less. I had a hard time reconciling the fact that my father (although he has a civil divorce from my mother) is married to both my mother and my step-mother in the Mormon temple, but my mother, unless she gets a temple divorce from my father, can never remarry another man in the temple. She doesn’t have the same rights as a man in the church. That isn’t okay to me.”

SPOILER ALERT: YOU CAN SUCK IT, plus Mormon Doctrine recited from memory | dooce ®: “‘We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are FIRST faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, SECOND repentance, THIRD baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, FOURTH laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.’

That’s right. LAYING ON OF HANDS. It doesn’t get much truer than that. As a former President of Early Morning Seminary and Earner of the Young Women’s Medallion and as Someone Who Repented of Her First Kiss,…”

There’s an indication here of a key aspect of pastoral power and that is the revelation of all of a person’s truth – an important part of repentance and something that is performed in Rousseau’s Confessions – and we see Armstrong claiming to repent of her first kiss, a classic instance of revealing the tiniest truth and the shaping of an individual through the confession.

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold | dooce ®: “I think that’s the thing I’ve realized lately through all the reading I’ve been doing, that I didn’t have a choice. I was forced at birth into a life full of guilt and repression, a life of thinking that my eternal salvation was at risk with every thought and desire in my heart. I lived 22 years in constant fear.”

This post gets to the heart of the individualising influence of pastoral power. The care for the individuals soul in this life and the next and the creation of an individuality borne out of a personal confession that both creates and shapes the individual. As Foucault attests, the power of pastoral care is the way the individual is shaped and submitted to “a set of very specific patterns.” In Armstrong’s case these patters are those developed and dictated by the Mormon church.

Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging: “Some days I feel my website writing itself”.

What I find interesting here is Armstrong’s reference to her website having a life of its own. Such an understanding of a blog is anticipated by Foucault in that he suggests that self-writing isn’t the revealing of the self but in fact the self being expressed.

“…the intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purposes that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (Foucault, 1997, p. 211).

In this we see the project on which Armstrong embarked, not as a way to reveal something deep and hidden within herself, but as a way to reveal that which she heard and saw. These included interactions with her supervisor, the Asian database administrator, and the colleague with whom she car-pooled. Her hupomnema – her blog – also shaped the self free from the constraints of her religion through the revelation of what she heard, did, and said in relation to her departure from the church.

Foucault, M. (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: subjectivity and truth. New York: The New Press.

A can of worms | dooce ®: “I have been reluctant to write about it here because my response to this show goes way beyond a cursory thumbs up or down. It is inextricably tied to how I feel about the Mormon church, and if I explain those feelings I am going to be crossing into some really uncomfortable territory for many members of my family who read this website.”

Armstrong backgrounds her departure from the church and her reluctance to discuss some matters on her blog.

Relaunch | dooce ®: “Dooce.com, however, will continue to offer up the best in expletive-laden religious and social frustration. This is who I am, just now I will leave my family out of it.”

Note the words “this is who I am”. An initial reading of the statement would suggest that the words represent who Armstrong is, but a post-structuralist understanding of the statement would indicate that the blog itself is Armstrong. Armstrong is not separate from the blog.

Memoirs of a Recovering Mormon | dooce ®: “I have wasted the last several hours of my life reading my journals from my freshman and sophomore years at BYU. I don’t think any other activity could be quite as depressing, except perhaps actually attending BYU. The following are selected excerpts from the sophomore year journal. Accounts of my freshman year are just too horrifying.”

It’s worth noting here that Armstrong makes a claim to being a prolific journal writer. This is one of the technologies of the self outlined by Foucault.