Exploring Pentecostal women's religious and gender identity

Abstract

This thesis explores the construction of religious and gender identity with women in Pentecostal churches through the use of in depth life story / narrative interviews with four women who regularly attend Pentecostal churches in the Wellington region. The focus of the research is primarily upon the strategies and discourse the women use to deal with potential contradictions between the women's understanding of their church's discourse on women's roles or position in the church, and their life experiences. Life story / narrative interviews were used because they have been recognised as a way of revealing the construction of self-identity and more specifically gender identity through revealing the way that women adopt and resist cultural discourses. The women's stories were constructed as testimonial type stories that instantiated their lives as witnessing not only to their own survival, but also to the truth of their church beliefs and practices. These testimonial type stories establish the women's membership of their religious groups and act to reaffirm their understanding of their religious faith. There were differences in the structure and language of the older and younger women's stories that reflected the different processes in telling of their lives so as to appropriate the past and anticipate the future in relation to different understandings of their current stage of life. The systems of meaning that the women operated within to formulate their understanding of themselves and those around them, is reflected in the language and categories of meaning they employed in speaking about their lives and experiences. In particular the women use language that represents their beliefs and practices about how God interacts with them and with "the world". The women's language is further characterised by binaries specific to their religious discourse. Gender is also conceived as a binary relationship in which the masculine and feminine are differentiated and opposite. Analysis of the women's stories identified six major themes that illustrate aspects of the construction of religious and gender identities. These were; 1. Themes around negotiating what it means to be Pentecostal; 2. Themes of being humble and ordinary women, who have been empowered by God; 3. Themes around negotiating identities as moral and righteous women; 4. Themes of spiritual and personal growth because of God's actions in their lives; 5. Themes around marriage and family relationships; and 6. Themes around church leadership. These themes reveal potentially contradictory subject positions with regard to the church's discourse on gender. I argue that Pentecostal women utilise core Pentecostal discourses of Spirit Baptism and spiritual empowerment to negotiate these potentially contradictory positions with regard to Pentecostal gender and religious practices. I suggest that these resistant discourses create spaces that enable coherent performances by Pentecostal women, of multiple and sometimes contradictory religious and gender identities.