Book Review: Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches

Abstract

The specific topics on which Coco elicits her interviewees' reactions are reality, selfidentity, truth and experience. She also develops a framework for exploring gender relations in the Church; it has four dimensions: relations of power, production, emotions and symbols. In describing these relations she focuses on participants' movements of body, feelings and emotions, perceptions, dispositions, and motivations and volitions.After devoting a chapter to each of the three groups of SMSs, structured according to the four dimensions of gender relations, Coco discusses the broad structural features that perpetuate Catholic subordinate-dominant relations. With reference to the traditional concept of the Church as the bride of Christ, she contends that ''the Church, meaning the very large proportion of Catholics, is in fact a bridal spouse, and . . . Catholics perform the feminized housework that keeps the household functioning'' (190). Although the ecclesiastical authorities like to call their organization ''Mother Church,'' Coco contends that ''Father Church'' would be a more accurate term, since men run the show.Coco is not hopeful that the Australian Church can meet the needs of the Catholics represented by her interviewees: ''Australian Catholics' resistance is treated as the action of deviants, those whose faith is weak, those who are feminist, or those who have sold out to media sensationalism, secular values and 'individualism''' (212). The four topics she investigated -reality, identity, truth and experience -are understood to be basically unchangeable in official Catholic ideology. She sees no evidence that Catholic ''hegemonic masculinity'' is really moving towards equality among adults.Although specific to Australia, Coco's findings and conclusions are applicable to North America and Europe, where conflicted Catholics have either left the Church or remain while rejecting many of its official teachings. Members of both groups will find this book helpful for understanding their own predicaments, and students of contemporary Catholicism and sociology of religion will be interested in Coco's theoretical framework.