A representação da identidade feminina em mulheres evangélicas na cidade do Recife: família, gênero e religião

Abstract

The history tells the peculiarity of the roll attributed to women in society. Through out the centuries this roll has been transformed along with the new ways of thinking and representing the world and the gender relations. For a long period of time the dominant representation was the religious one to be more precise, in the western culture, the Jewish and Christian. We continue to receive influences from this specific view of world, but in a very particular way considering the changes and the new social, economical and cultural context of post-modernity. As we become subjects in a cultural and social context of which religion is part, the following question arises: What is the possibility of thinking about the feminine identity having the religious experience as a starting point. Therefore, the present study searched to apprehend the representation of Feminine Identity presented by evangelical women, living in the metropolitan area of Recife, by analyzing how they comprehend the roll of woman in family, public space and the influences of the religious Christian protestant code. For this, fifteen women pertaining to the average sociocultural layer, with age between 20 and 35 years, created in a protestant Christian home and that has been currently congregating in Historical Churches (Baptist; Presbyterian and Episcopal) participated in this study. The social pointers taken in consideration to define the social class were: instruction degree, profession, place of residence and monthly income. We carried out half-structuralized interviews, in the schedule and place of convenience of the participants, by asking the following starting question: What it means, for you, to be woman? . To analyze the supplied material, we transcribed the participant s speeches, and guided by the objectives of the research, we made use of the Analysis of the Content. We identified two main groups: Gender relations: in the family, at work and at church and Women of other times and of nowadays . We loaned from the Theory of the Cinema the term addressing ways in order to explain what are the social representations from a post-structuralism perspective, and after that, to understand the interpretation of these women on what it means to be woman. In relation to these identities crossed by the religious speech, we saw that the transmission and the investment in such positionings require the belief in the disclosed content as Holy. So, out of the religious significance systems, these positions would receive other valuations. In this context, the participants make use of Adam and Eve criacional myth in order to explain the established gender relations inside the spaces they occupy. For believing that the woman was made for the man, aiming at to complement it, they are represented as being its helper. In this relation, the man is pointed out to be the couple1 s leader - nominated head of the home - having the woman to submit to his leadership. Nevertheless, the thematic of submission is directly related with the kind of gender relation established inside a social space (either private or public). Concomitantly, these same women receive other addressings, from varied speeches, influencing the reading and redirection of the positions received from the Christian protestant religious speech. Reading and redirection identified through the presented variations of significations.