Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Katherine Dugan Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 296 pp. $32.00. When Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada stepped into the basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she stepped into a world where Catholic masculinity is constructed and sustained. As she argues in Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this world is "how religious men come to understand themselves and be recognized as men" (2). This Catholic manhood entails tattoos that articulate religious commitments and the work of the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dance of the Giglio. Framing her intervention, Maldonado-Estrada points out that the nuances of Catholic men's lives are understudied: "[i]t is odd to say it, but laymen are largely invisible in histories of Catholic devotional life. Or they are foils, by contrast heightening the piety of women" (10). This book enters a long conversation about Catholic devotionalism, which has historically centered women's experiences. Turning to men's devotional lives, this book charts the nature of man-making devotional labor. The structure of this book moves swiftly through arguments about the locations of religious practice, the role of labor in prayer, the place of money in festivals, questions about public performance of masculinities, and analysis of gentrification and the shifting nature of [End Page 81] urban religion. Among the many contributions this text makes to Catholic studies, three are especially poignant. First, in this book, devotionalism takes place in a relatively unexplored set of registers: bodies, joking, work, men's relationships and male homosocial spaces. Maldonado-Estrada posits that the men's tattoos are "devotional objects" that mediate relationship between themselves and the divine (48). Likewise, the aesthetics of this devotionalism are such that the men embody a "devotion that allows men to transgress, to play with vibrant aesthetics . . . and white heteronormativity" (54). This expands where scholars locate devotionalism: from women's spaces to men's; from inside churches to outside; and from subdued to vibrant aesthetics. Second, Maldonado-Estrada's attention to nuances of her ethnographic method is a model. While she notes that a woman in men's spaces should not have to talk or think so much about her gendered positionality (17), the way she does unfold the layers of her own positionality offers a thoughtful contribution to questions about method. She refuses to shy away from the way her female body, her Puerto Rican identity, her ability to paint, and her willingness to joke with the men in these pages built her method. During her years of fieldwork, Maldonado-Estrada spent countless hours building ethnographic relationships with the men who constitute the "lifeblood" (210) of this festival. This is how she "made real friendships that exceed the language of methodology" and "became a woman researcher who belonged in the masculine spaces of the feast" (104). The craft and style of her self-reflective negotiations enrich the work. Third, Lifeblood of the Parish is also a portrait of the shifting landscape of urban Catholicism in the early twenty-first century. This is about gentrification, changing parish demographics, and an urban Catholicism that is tied to Italian practices. When Maldonado-Estrada turns her descriptive eye to what she calls "public masculinity" (143) on display in the feast, she argues that the "muscle" of the Dance of the Giglio facilitates a normative heterosexuality through homosocial spaces (163). That space asserts a particular interpretation of Italian American identity onto the streets of Williamsburg—even among the changing demographics of the neighborhood (209). The focus on laymen's lives addresses a significant lacuna in Catholic studies. Maldonado-Estrada's decision to focus on masculinities is an important intervention: we all know women are around the edges of these men's devotional lives, but that is where they remain for the men in this book. This is a book and a story about men's lives, marked as men—the accompanying women fall outside the frame...