Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities

Description

This collection of essays explores how women from a variety of religious and cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada. Focusing on women’s religiosity, it examines the ways in which they have carried and conserved, and brought forward and transformed their cultures—old and new—in modern Canada.

Each essay explores the ways in which the religiosities of women serve as locations for both the assertion and the refashioning of individual and communal identity in transcultural contexts. Three shared assumptions guide these essays: religion plays a dynamic role in the shaping and reshaping of social cultures; women are active participants in their transmission and their transformation; and a focus on women's activities within their religious traditions—often informal and unofficial—provides new perspectives on the intersection of religion, gender, and transnationalism.

Since the first European migrations, Canada has been shaped by immigrant communities as they negotiated the tension between preserving their religious and cultural traditions and embracing the new opportunities in their adopted homeland. Viewing those interactions through the lens of women’s religiosity, the essays in this collection model an innovative approach and provide new perspectives for students and researchers of Canadian Studies, Religious Studies, and Women’s Studies.

Sujets

• Religión
• Transnational
• Hybridity
• Gendér
• Social Action
• Women's studies
• Transcultural
• Childbirth
• Multiculturalism
• Spirituality
• Religion
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781771121569
• Langue: English

Extrait

Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities
Studies in Women and Religion tudes sur les femmes et la religion
Studies in Women and Religion is a series designed to serve the needs of established scholars in this new area, whose scholarship may not conform to the parameters of more traditional series with respect to content, perspective, and/or methodology. The series will also endeavour to promote scholarship on women and religion by assisting new scholars in developing publishable manuscripts. Studies published in this series will reflect the wide range of disciplines in which the subject of women and religion is currently being studied, as well as the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that characterize contemporary women s studies. Books in English are published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Inquiries should be directed to the series coordinator.
COORDINATOR Heidi Epstein St. Thomas More College University of Saskatchewan
COORDINATRICE Monique Dumais Universit du Qu bec, Rimouski
Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities

Becky R. Lee and Terry Tak-ling Woo, editors
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Canadian women shaping diasporic religious identities / Becky R. Lee and Terry Tak-ling Woo, editors.
(Studies in women and religion ; v. 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77112-153-8 (bound).-ISBN 978-1-77112-154-5 (paperback).-
ISBN 978-1-77112-156-9 (epub).-ISBN 978-1-77112-155-2 (pdf)
1. Women-Religious life-Canada. 2. Feminism-Religious aspects-Canada. 3. Canada-Religion-21st century. I. Lee, Becky R., [date], editor II. Woo, Terry Tak-ling, 1952-, editor III. Series: Studies in women and religion (Waterloo, Ont.) ; v. 13
BL625.7.C35 2015 200.820971 C2015-902615-6 C2015-902616-4
Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover illustration copyright Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2014. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Text design by Lime Design, Inc.
2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part A
Christianity and Judaism in Newfoundland, Ontario, and Alberta
1 He s My Best Friend
Relationality, Materiality, and the Manipulation of Motherhood in Devotion to St. Gerard Majella in Newfoundland
MARION BOWMAN
2 She Couldn t Come to the Table til She Was Churched
Anglican Women, Childbirth, and Embodied Christian Practice in Conception Bay, Newfoundland
BONNIE MORGAN
3 On the Margins of Church and Society
Roman Catholic Feminisms in English-Speaking Canada
BECKY R. LEE
4 Unveiling Leah
Examining Women s Voices in Two Canadian Jewish Worship Services
AVIVA GOLDBERG
Part B
New Religions in Canada
5 Charity Chicks
A Discourse-Analysis of Religious Self-Identification of Rural Canadian Mormon Women
KATE POWER
6 The Whole World Opened Up
Women in Canadian Theosophy
GILLIAN MCCANN
7 Belief, Identity, and Social Action in the Lives of Bah Women
Lynn Echevarria
Part C
South Asian Religions in Southwest Ontario
8 Being Hindu in Canada
Experiences of Women
ANNE M. PEARSON WITH PREETI NAYAK
9 Women in Hinduism
Ritual Leadership in the Adhi Parasakthi Temple Society of Canada
NANETTE R. SPINA
Conclusion
Bibliography for Women and Religion from 1951 to 2013
About the Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their patience and generosity. Special thanks are owed to those who worked behind the scenes to make this volume possible: the editors at Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses Francis Landy and Patricia Dold; Heidi Epstein at St. Thomas More University of Saskatchewan and series editor of Studies in Women and Religion; Kerry Fast, our copy editor; and the editorial team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Introduction
Pierre Elliott Trudeau , prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1984 but for nine months, likened living next to the United States to sleeping with an elephant. Although he was commenting on the political implications, it is equally true in the academic sphere. Today there is a considerable body of scholarly analyses of North American women s participation in their religious traditions. 1 Because of the disparity in size between Canada and the United States, and their geographic proximity, much of that scholarship focuses on American women s experiences. For those same reasons, there is a tendency to assume that Canadian women s experiences approximate American women s. However, the settlement and religious histories of Canada differ significantly from its neighbour to the south. This collection of chapters explores the ways in which women in different religious-cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada shaped by those histories.
Religiosities
Diasporic Religious Beliefs and Practices in Ordinary Circumstances
THE CHAPTERS IN THIS COLLECTION put women at the centre of their religious traditions and examine the ways in which they have carried and conserved, brought forward and transformed their cultures through religion in modern and contemporary Canada. All of the religious groups represented in these chapters are diasporic settler communities. Some, like the Bah and Hindu communities, arrived relatively recently in Canada. Others, especially Roman Catholics and Anglicans, have such long histories in Canada that we tend to forget that they, too, have been transplanted here from other lands. That tendency is the reason we have chosen to call this collection Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities . Paul Bramadat raises the problematic understanding of Canadian identity that underlies the common use of the term diaspora. 2 According to Bramadat, on some basic level, the concept of diaspora frames members of so-called diasporic communities as those who really belong somewhere else, 3 unlike Christians of European heritage for whom, it is assumed, Canada is their homeland. We agree with Bramadat. The interactions between place, difference, and identity within the Canadian context are far more complex. Bramadat suggests that rather than rejecting the term, we should broaden the meaning of diaspora to include all communities of people who harbor deep emotional ties to some other place. 4 This collection attempts to do so, examining the intersection of place, difference, and identity in the religiosities of women from the oldest settler communities in Canada to relatively recent immigrant communities.
In addition to different migration histories, the groups represented here embody disparate cosmological beliefs and practices, and occupy a spectrum of socio-economic statuses. Most importantly, there is no unified vision here because women do not, by virtue of gender, form a common constituency. It is the intersection of many factors, including but not limited to ethnicity, culture, socio-economic status, ability, geographic (dis)location, sexuality, and gender that shape one s identity, perspective, experiences, and interactions. There are, however, functional similarities among the communities examined here. The religiosities of the women represented serve as locations for both the assertion of self-identity in diaspora and resistance to institutions old and new, within and without their faith traditions.
We have chosen to focus on women s religiosity rather than on their religions because religiosity encompasses and illuminates the dynamics at the intersection of religion, gender, and diaspora. Cultural anthropologist Mayfair Yang defines religiosity as the religious feeling or experience of individual believers. 5 Shifting the focus from religions to the religious feelings and experiences of individual believers illuminates and validates the variety of ways women express themselves religiously. Although the religious traditions represented here vary doctrinally in their teachings about women, across those traditions women have been subject to contradictory messages about, and experiences of, their places within their religious communities. As Mary Farrell Bednarowski describes this situation, women are simultaneously out