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Mormon Celebrity, Mormon Normalcy, and the Dress
We will get to the violin playing. First, let's talk about the dress. On May 17, 2015, the Mormon blogosphere erupted into controversy over the designer gown worn by dancing violinist and YouTube star Lindsey Stirling to the Billboard Music Awards show, where she was to receive the Top Dance/Electronic Album honor. Much of her fan base was torn. Her charm, her quirky fiddle-prancing shtick, and her unapologetic LDS religiosity had made her one of the most eminently Facebookable Mormons in an era in which LDS members have been encouraged quite specifically over the pulpit to share their faith online. And yet there she was, posing for the press in a form-fitting dress with slinky black crisscross straps that framed far too many windowpanes of flesh. "You were a role model until you publicly shamed your religion," one Instagram commenter lamented.1 Was Stirling flouting-or had she somehow missed-the continued ecclesiastical admonishment and consequent orthodox eagerness, now several years running, to cover the skin from shoulder to knee?
On the other hand, some less conservative voices, many of which, I suspect, do not regularly ride on the same social media bandwagons as do Stirling's fans, leapt to defend her autonomy over her own body and its public presentation and, explicitly or implicitly, enlist the incident in an ongoing critique of Mormon modesty culture's obsession with surface and assumption of the "male gaze."2 Stirling herself proposed an odd and logically limber defense: "The dress I wore to the awards was fully lined with tan fabric. But after looking at the pictures, I see that you actually can't tell that it's lined. In hind sight [sic] it wasn't the best choice because modesty is important to me."3 Some echoed this cognitively dissonant tack. Megan Gee, a fashion video blogger and student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, encountered a number of students who were perplexed by the dress, including one who felt "like it's kind of misleading a little bit because you can't tell if it's modest or not" (emphasis added).4 Yes, the dress looked provocative, but was it technically "modest" because the open parts were lined with skin-colored fabric? Does counterfeit immodesty contain a self-cancelling double negative that leaves you with...