Pentecostal Charismatic Women

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Constructions of Femininity in Alexandra Township This is a Black feminist autoethnographic study written from the perspective of an insider in both the Pentecostal community and Alexandra township. The book uncovers the daily lives of women in an African Pentecostal community while relating them to Black/African feminist and womanist theory. This reveals how the Charismatic women of Alexandra build strong bonds with one another despite their differences and contest controlling images of femininity even as they sometimes traffic in problematic heteronormative constructions of social life. This book examines Charismatic discourses that build the gender identities of women congregants. It also observes and records women churchgoers to give insights into their personal perceptions, embodiments and performances of power and agency within the church and the wider societal spaces that they occupy. It is an intervention into anthropological work as much as one on the internalised oppression of women. Rather than stay within the confines of “agency versus oppression” discourses, this book offers feminist imaginaries that expose the complexities and contestations that exist in both sermons and the intimate relations that women have with each other.

Note on Translations

Preface

Chapter 1 Constructing Femininities: Becoming Women

Pentecostal History: Identity Re/Formations
Black Feminist Theology
Womanism, Black Feminism and African Feminism
Entry Points
Chapter 2: Contested Pentecostalisms: A Review

Have You Read the Comaroffs?
Upward Mobility, Breaking from the Past and the Prosperity Gospel
Mediated Pentecostalism and Shaping “the World”
Gendered Ideologies and Identities
A Problematic View
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Between the Feminised Other and Black Women’s Power

Beyond the Feminised Other
African Gender Discourses: Religion, Culture and the Law
Gender as Performativity
Wilful Whispers
Conclusion
Chapter 4: This Field I Call Home

Chapter 5: Constructions of Femininity

Get Me to the Church on Time
When Church Is in Session
Living Word
Upper Hall Ministries
God’s Love
Red Sea Ministries
The Sermons

The Sound of Wedding Bells
Same Bells Different Ideologies
Women in the Pulpit
Men in the Pulpit
From the Mouths of Babes BomThandazo

Desire: Marriage, Heterosexual Love
Going 50/50: Definitions of Equality and Gender Roles
Prayer Scarfs: Respectability and the Female Fear Factory
We Don’t Want to Be Judged
Pastor Fuckboys and the Art of Dating
Femininity from Their Mothers to Their Churches
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Conclusion
Chapter 6: A Question of Difference

Notes

Bibliography

About the author

Index

Tumi Mampane is an African feminist PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Media, University of Johannesburg affiliated to the NRF SARCHi Chair in African Feminist Imagination at Nelson Mandela University. Tumi is also a lecturer at the Department of Communication Science, University of the Free State. Her research interests include cultural and media studies, township femininities, popular culture, African Pentecostalisms, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, ethnography, and feminist theory.