Description
Evangelical organizations have a growing political and social influence in the U.S., making them key sites to study religious gendered scripts and their impacts on women who are members. Hegemonic discourses designating gender roles for members limit women’s subjectivities within evangelical churches. A poststructural focus on discourse is adopted to understand how women’s collective subjectivities interact with an evangelical church’s gendered scripts. In-depth interviewing (n = 17) was used to examine the discourses of women in small groups at an evangelical church in the southwest region of the United States. The women of the church made themselves subject to two dominant discourses that collectively bent the norms of the church in gendered ways. Female members enacted concertive resistance through their eagerness to study evangelical doctrines, oscillating between the church’s gendered scripts of rationality and emotionality. While results on evangelical gendered scripts are specific to the evangelical church studied, they develop a more comprehensive understanding of discursive closure in religious environments, as well as concertive expressions of resistance within totalistic organizations. Keywords: enclaves, bounded rationality, poststructuralism, concertive resistance
