[“TUCK: Well, I was about to ask that actually, I was gonna ask how growing up around Mennonite and formerly Mennonite people informed the ways that you first had concepts of gender and gender roles and stuff?
CASEY: Oh, shit, what a great question! Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so like, on my mother's side, specifically, my mother's side is more rural, more conservative, and a little more old school—my father's family belonged to a Mennonite denomination that was kind of a little more assimilated, a little more, kind of had more things in common with, like, U.S.-style evangelicism. And they were more urban. So I'm specifically talking about my mother's side of things here. They’re EMC, used to be the Kleine Gemeinde. Maybe like three people will know what that means, but that's for you! My mom's family was EMC, my dad's family was Mennonite Bretheren. There you go. Anyway, that was a branch of religion that practiced, you know, it was like very specific about traditional gender roles where things were very gender segregated. You know, my mom, for example, grew up where like, there were men who sat on one side of the church and women who sat on the other side. Like that kind of thing. I think it stopped when she was like, maybe a teenager or in her early 20s. It was before I was born, but it was like just before I was born.
But also, Mennonites practice unconditional pacifism, and there is this extremely… um, an underpinning of the religion is non-violence. And I mean, like, there's plenty of violence that happens in Mennonite communities, but there is still sort of a different attitude towards it, and a lot of the religion is centered around this idea of peace, in every kind of sense of the term, which obviously intersects a lot with questions of gender. So I would say that when I was growing up, I mean, like, Mennoniteism influenced a lot about like, gave me sort of this weird role models of peaceful masculinity. Like, that that was possible. Like, there's also plenty of role models that were not peaceful masculinity, but like they were there and they existed. Traditional Mennoniteism kind of like doesn't really fit in terms of like, our modern political parlance in all sorts of ways, because it comes with things like pacifism, because it has—some parts of it have this really like socialist ethoses. Like, there's this group of people called Hutterites that are an offshoot of Mennonites that literally believe that private property is a sin. Like it's an actual literal hell-worthy sin to have private property. You know, they're also an extraordinarily like, deathly homophobic society. And you can find lots of stuff from their expats that will talk to you about that. And also, it's like, I mean, I've been on Hutterite colonies, and they're like, literal, functional communes that are like, kind of amazing and beautiful. And also, the last time I was on one was when I was nine years old, because for obvious reasons.”]
Casey Plett Gender Reveal
