Abstract
Pentecostal Charismatic churches in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg. I study these churches and the gender discourses they produce both by looking at their pastors’ sermons and by conducting ethnographic research with female churchgoers. Using elements of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis and (auto)ethnography, and working within a Black and African feminist and womanist framework, I examine the construction of roles, attitudes and stereotypes within charismatic discourses that build the gender identities of women congregants. I also observe and converse with women churchgoers to come to an understanding of their desires and ideas about respectability and shame, and of their interaction and negotiation with the discourses of their churches. I give insights into their personal perceptions, embodiments and performances of power and agency within the church and the wider societal spaces that these women churchgoers occupy. I apply my Black and African feminist and womanist lenses to foreground the women’s experiences and ensure that their language and their beliefs about their femininity are attended to. I argue that the constructions of femininity and gender identity in these churches produce an unresolved tension between traditional African views of womanhood and challenges to them from a broadly modern feminist standpoint...
M.A. (Communication Studies)