(iPoster) Always the Carer, Never the Pastor: Gendered Labor in Congregations and Beyond

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics

Abstract

Enduring socioeconomic gender inequities in liberal democracies have coincided with the financial and electoral rise of the ‘religious right’ and ‘religious nationalism’ over the past decade, spanning countries from Poland, Italy, Croatia, and Hungary to the United States. Specific socioeconomic inequalities include backsliding in women’s reproductive rights and stagnant or widening gender gaps in pay, pension, and unpaid care work. Likewise, despite comprising majorities of churchgoers, women remain excluded from denominational leadership and governance, even as they donate money more frequently and consistently, perform unpaid labor in places of worship, maintain religious rituals and practices in households, facilitate multigenerational church attendance, prepare holiday meals, etc. Therefore, while women are excluded from pastoral care, sacramental power, and denominational privileges, they provide various forms of uncompensated care that sustains religious congregations.

This paper argues that gendered labor exploitation within religious congregations reinforces broader gender inequities in liberal democracies. The paper takes up Foucault’s hypotheses that pastoral power has long informed the logic of modern governmental power and has historically intersected with gender and other power relations. I critically explore a corollary of these hypotheses that gendered inequalities in the pastorate continue to reinforce gender inequalities in the functioning of governmental power. However, I argue, this is only the case in societies where the pastorate and the functions of liberal democracy and the welfare state have become increasingly entangled over time, as expressed in the rise of religious nationalism.

To advance this argument, the paper develops the concept of a ‘gendered economy of the pastorate.’ The concept captures how congregations and churches are reproduced through the extraction of gendered surplus value created through gendered surplus labor or the various forms of everyday congregational care. Thus, by reworking classical Marxist concepts, the paper explains how religious congregations and denominations benefit from, and are reproduced through, excess and uncompensated labor performed by gendered/feminized bodies, from cis and trans-women to female-presenting men. To build an intersectional (class and gender conscious) analysis of the pastoral economy and rework classical Marxist concepts and Foucault’s work on pastoral power, the paper draws on (1) feminist-theological critiques of androcentric ecclesiastic discourses and practices (hooks, Ruether, Gross, and Schüssler Fiorenza), and (2) the radical feminist political economy of Cohen, Federici, Fine, etc.

Author

• Bojan Savic, University of Kent