Graduate students and early career scholars will present innovative research from fresh questions at the intersection of gender and religion in light of the conference theme “La Labor de Nuestras Manos” (“The Labor of Our Hands”). These papers all engage the theme of “women’s work,” broadly construed, and consider how religion constructs the labor traditionally associated with women’s roles in ways that devalue, exalt, oppress or liberate such labor. Ranging from Xvangelical perspectives on reproduction and abortion, to a reading of colonized Aboriginal domestic labor through Ruth 2, to early Pentecostal understandings of women’s religious praxis beyond the home, to the spiritual healing work of early church female deacons, these papers delve into the heart of religion and gender construction dynamics and shed light on the major transformations of gender in our time.
Evangelicals have proven capable of changing their views on contested issues in light of popular opinion, but abortion remains sticky. Following the overturn of Roe v Wade, many evangelicals have not challenged “pro-life” discourse, but xvangelical authors Glennon Doyle and Jen Hatmaker open avenues to think about “pro-life” in a different way. By taking into consideration the emotional and physical labor of the pregnant person as the one whose life is under attack, Doyle and Hatmaker shift the focus of (anti-)abortion discourse. This paper offers a close analysis of the rhetoric employed by Doyle and Hatmaker in speaking about the highly contested issue of abortion and points out the feminist trajectories these authors are on. It critiques existing narratives about abortion, to which these authors are responding, and demonstrates the ways their approaches may further or hinder an evangelical audience in following suit in support of reproductive justice.
This paper explores the intersections between biblical interpretation and the legacies of settler colonialism in the lands now called Australia. It brings Ruth 2 into conversation with the poetry of Narungga woman Natalie Harkin, drawing on feminist and contrapuntal reading strategies and through the eyes of a ‘Settler’ woman. In the conversation that unfolds, the paper explores how women’s work is framed within interpretations of Ruth 2 alongside the use of Aboriginal women’s domestic labour in the Australian context as a means of colonial and religious domination and control. Through bringing these diverse texts together, the paper contributes to a broader question of how Settler Australians might read biblical texts and settler colonial contexts in ways that do not perpetuate colonial structures but contribute to constructions of work and community that might be liberative and decolonizing.
This study considers early Pentecostalism’s construction and praxis of “woman’s work” through an examination of the work, challenges, and solidarities among three founding members of early American Pentecostalism: Aimee Semple McPherson, Lucy Farrow, and Lizzie Woods Robinson. These leading women pioneered and influenced Pentecostal denominations through their work as women. Although they were shapers of early Pentecostalism in the US, their work as women is often neglected, and some women are still not ordained in some of the Pentecostal denominations. This study further explores how they viewed the interpretation of the biblical word ‘ēzer found in Genesis 2:18 (help meet/helper), specifically regarding “woman’s work” or their labor as women. It clarifies how “woman’s work” in the Pentecostal church has been defined and redefined in praxis and theory over time, which provides insight as to how it should be viewed today.
St. Domnika was a deaconess near Constantinople in the late fourth century. While some writers minimize the role of the female deacon as one only concerned with protecting women’s modesty, Pauliina Pylvänäinen’s excellent analysis of the functions of female deacons in the _Apostolic Constitutions_ presents the θεραπεύειν of the female deacon as related to the bishop’s spiritual work. She exercised healing in a way the male bishop could not, in women’s spaces and in private conversations. The liturgical and hagiographical tradition of the deaconess Domnika is a case study for evidence of Pylvänäinen’s theory that women deacons participated in the work of spiritual healing. We can trace the development of her veneration from the fourth century image of deaconesses presented in the _Apostolic Constitutions_ through her hagiography to her ecclesial hymns, finding an image of pastoral care and spiritual healing throughout.