This research is premised on the investigation of two under-researched groups within the Church of England, whose subjectivities have altered since the Church of England made the momentous decision to allow the ordination of women in 1992. Whilst women priests more generally have been subject to research investigation and comment, priests as mothers and the non-ordained spouses of women priests are two groups of people whose experiences and subjectivities have not been explored in explicit detail. Indeed, at the heart of this research is the theme of gender identity and how femininities and masculinities are lived and negotiated by these two groups constructing their identities within the boundaries of the Church. Rather than considering gender in a one-dimensional way, by focusing on both femininities and masculinities a more nuanced and complex picture will be allowed to emerge. This study emphasises the way in which everyday life is negotiated and lived and how this often disrupts traditional established binaries such as public and private, masculinity and femininity, sacred and profane. It considers how women priests negotiate an institution governed by sacredly masculinist norms and how their positioning as mothers impacts on this mediation. Motherhood is taken as a topic of salient concern, unpicking its ideologies and how these dominant ideas have been informed by both secular and religious discourses, especially regarding how sacred and profane discourses impact on motherhood’s construction. And how men as spouses mediate a terrain established as explicitly feminine is considered, highlighting the means through which gender acts as an important mechanism through which expectation and practice is established but how this is explicitly interwoven through particular gendered ways of experiencing public and private divisions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:519879 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Page, Sarah-Jane |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/1459/ |
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