The difference it makes: Contested gender and the production of religion.

摘要

This dissertation presents the results of a multi-site ethnographic project examining the relationship between gender, religion, and identity as they were produced in contexts of ongoing social change. Russian Orthodoxy as a transnational phenomenon has been shaped both by the rise and fall of Soviet communism and by global changes brought about by the spread of capitalism, secularism, and transnational mobility. Religion, which is often central to the discourses and institutions of politics, economics, and domestic arrangements, is significantly shaped by gender. Using Russian Orthodoxy as a case study, this dissertation explores the ways religious structures and hierarchies are often explicitly gendered. Values, morals, and pieties are cast in masculine and feminine terms. Believers encounter symbols, divinities, saints, heroes, and villains as masculine or feminine, and the histories, parables, and sagas in which figures and symbols appear are contextualized in gendered societies and cultures. In Orthodox communities in New Jersey and St. Petersburg, we can see that gender impacts religion not only as history and ideology, but also in an immediate and material sense. In both post-Soviet Russia and in New Jersey, gender roles were contested and changing, although not at the same speed or in the same ways. The backlash against Soviet-era gender roles, anxiety about secularism, anomie arising from rapid social change, and debates about contested women's rights also figure in the construction and selection of religious discourses.; Just as individuals deploy religion in their discourses about gender, identity, morality and power, so, too, do religious institutions, clergy and lay believers deploy gender in their construction and reproduction of religion. By examining Russian Orthodoxy in transnational and post-Soviet contexts, we can see some of the ways in which gendered religious institutions and symbolism impact the production of not only gender roles but also the religious experiences of individual believers, the construction of religious identity, social philosophies and politics. Gendered expectations shaped men's and women's religious experiences differently. Religious practice, parish organization, and personal piety were influenced by gendered secular, religious, and domestic relationships as believers negotiated labor, authority, and responsibility within their families, churches, and communities.