Liturgy and Gendered Lives

The category "gender," which in my use undergirds the term "women," attends to all gendered identities and sexualities—men, eunuchs, children, lesbians, hermaphrodites, syneisactics, transgendered people, and others—precisely in their gendered particularities (a focus on women, to be sure, does not intend to privilege men as unproblematic and leave men's cultures as unmarked, as if women alone were gendered). I thus understand gender as a web of oppositions and relationships, all of which are unstable and context-specific. Gender, then, is nothing if not a relational category—relational to "the other (gender)," but relational also to wider cultural materials. What relationship is there between gender, thus understood, and liturgy? No liturgy was ever celebrated in a vacuum, void of cultural referents, and gender constructions continue to be one such fundamental cultural referent in liturgy, even (or maybe especially?) at a moment in time when traditional gender constructions are in crisis. I will simply claim here that gender has always been and continues to be a fundamental marker of all liturgical life; this essay, with its focus on the "contemporary church," is not the place to display how historically the liturgy was profoundly shaped by, and shaped, performances of gender and symbolic meanings associated with femininity and masculinity. Suffice it to say that the discipline of liturgical studies in general, and liturgical historiography in particular, have largely occluded this gendered nature of all liturgical life. Fortunately, recent gender-attentive work in liturgical historiography has allowed us to glimpse the deeply gendered nature of all liturgical traditions and practices.²

What work does an insistence on gender do for our thinking about the contemporary church and its liturgical life? Let us take a quick look at the life of an ordinary parish, my own. Here is what I see:

• a woman sitting in a wheelchair serves as eucharistic minister. She smiles broadly at people who have to bow low to receive the body of Christ;

• a group of older women gathers in the dimly lit church. They kneel in front of a statue of Mary and begin to recite the rosary. Their voices fill the whole church;

• a woman accompanies her daughter to the child's first reconciliation in church, painfully aware that the girl has suffered her father's sexual advances and now is asked to receive the sacrament of reconciliation from a "Father";

• a woman hurries to church with her infant son. Her babysitting arrangement fell through, and it is too late to find another person to take her place as lector in this liturgy. The woman processes in with her baby in her arms, having handed the Gospel book to the priest to carry. After the liturgy, one of the women in the congregation says: "I saw my life brought into the sanctuary today";

• a woman enters the church halfway through the eucharistic service. She carries a large image of La Virgen de Guadalupe. While the priest continues with the eucharistic prayer, the Latina grandmother self-confidently places her image of the Virgin on the altar steps;

• a woman attends Sunday worship after having given birth. Her body bears the marks of her nursing a child. She receives communion, a living representation of the ancient image of the Eucharist as God's breast milk;

• a woman comes to a Good Friday service with bruises on her body from a domestic assault. She moves forward slowly, cringing at the veneration of the cross with its portrayal of an abused human body;

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