“Never feminist enough”: gender justice and lutheran women in Brazil

Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality

Year: 2023

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/3rd.icgss.2023.03.102

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“Never feminist enough”: gender justice and lutheran women in Brazil

Joyce Aparecida Pires

ABSTRACT: 

There is a facility for the Lutheran religion to provide a social space for women that do not occur in other Churches in Brazil. Even so, being a woman, a Christian, and a feminist is conflicting and “never feminist enough”. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is where the historical religious subordination of women arises and it is from there that I have outlined the intersectionalities, strategies, and viability of women in the IECLB. The objective was to discuss the processes of ecclesiastical participation of women in the Evangelical Church of Lutheran Confessionality in Brazil (IECLB). As a Church constituted by german protestant immigrants at the end of the 19th century, attempts at religious freedom, construction of presence, and frameworks configured a process of Brazilianization of the Lutheran Church in Brazil. I carried out a multisited ethnography in the Southeast and South of Brazil and a bibliographic review on the subject. I experienced the way they question patriarchal and androcentric notions in Christianity and how they act in the traditions and public incidences that feed their desires for structural changes in society. Part of the research process followed an advance in clerical citizenship and women’s articulations around gender dissidence in the Church. It is noteworthy that the Lutherans establish a relationship and cultural appropriation of the particular southern culture, the so-called Gaucho Traditionalist Movement. A Church project in Brazil is underway and the recognition of women is increasingly guaranteeing them a fairer and more representative position in the Church.

keywords: evangelical churches, feminism, Lutheranism