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Women and the Catholic Church

Negotiating Identity and Agency

Women and the Catholic Church cover

Women and the Catholic Church

Negotiating Identity and Agency

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Description

How do Catholic women make sense of their involvement in a church with restrictive gendered roles and responsibilities? Is there a vision for church which might provide Catholic women with a faith community of hope, justice and flourishing?

Introducing a new methodological approach to the study of Catholic women, this book provides fresh insights into women's religious and spiritual experiences and church participation. Drawing on a case study of Australian Catholic women, Tracy McEwan develops the notion of “technologies of Catholicism” to explore the ways in which women shape their religious and secular identities against the backdrop of a masculinist Church.

This book is a key resource for those seeking to understand women's struggle to negotiate the impact of Catholicism and its oppressive gendered theologies. It introduces the term “everyday spiritual abuse” to explain the harm Catholic women experience on a day-to-day basis as they negotiate multiple material, spiritual, and structural inequalities. It proposes an alternative feminist model of church, which is contained and produced in the herstories of women.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Table of Contents

1: Introduction
2: Identity and authority
3: Magisterial ecclesiology: Virgin, bride, mother
4: Theorising power/knowledge for a feminist study of women in Catholicism
5: Invented identities
6: Enacting agency
7: The consequences of a lack of recognisability
8: A place where Catholic women might flourish
Afterword
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Apr 24 2025
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9781350424821
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Tracy McEwan

Tracy McEwan is a theologian and sociologist of re…

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