Laboring Before Believing: Emotional Labor and Gendered Religious Practices Among Women in Rural China

• In Event: 40820 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Sexuality, Gender, and Religion

Abstract

This paper challenges such assumptions through a year-long ethnographic study of women adherents of folk religions, Buddhism, and Daoism across rural villages in Zhejiang, China, interrogating the dynamic interplay between faith and emotional labor by centering women’s roles in religious practices and their self-perceptions of religiosity (Casselberry 2017).
Our findings reveal three key insights: First, we identify a disjuncture between faith and emotional labor, as women frequently engage in religious labor—such as preparing ritual offerings or organizing ancestral worship—before developing personal faith, thereby framing these acts as familial obligations rather than spiritual choices (Khan et al. 2024). Second, tracing the roots of this labor, we uncover how patriarchal structures intersect with religious processes, where women’s participation is often initiated through gendered expectations (e.g., spousal or maternal roles) rather than individual volition—a dynamic that echoes earlier findings on gendered emotional labor (Wells 2021). Finally, we argue that the fusion of familial patriarchy and religious rituals in Chinese folk traditions genderizes and politicizes faith practices, subtly integrating women into hierarchical power systems (Casselberry 2017).
Building on these findings, we propose the novel concept of the “familial religious carrier” to emphasize how religious practices are reproduced through family structures, shaping gendered divisions of affective labor. Women’s contributions—often dismissed as “secondary” tasks—are naturalized as moral duties, rendering their labor unpaid and reinforcing existing gender orders. By situating emotional labor not merely as an expression of faith but as an extension of familial responsibility, this study challenges conventional theories of affective labor (Hochschild 1983) and opens new avenues for examining how family dynamics mediate women’s religious agency and social identities (Lawton and Cadge 2024).

Authors

• Yushan Lei, Fudan University

• Yizheng Wu, Fudan University

• Jingjia Xiao, University of California-San Diego