Abstract
Femininity and female gender roles in conservative religious environments are highly disputed topics both within communities of faith and in sociological discourse. In light of social transformations of gender perceptions in the past decades, conservative Christians have had to reevaluate traditional understandings of womanhood in societies that have become steeped in popular culture and thoroughly mediatized. Taking this development as a point of departure, this article examines how femininity is represented in the International Christian Fellowship, particularly on its “Ladies Lounge” webpage. Advertising an annual event geared exclusively towards women, the website’s landing page contains images and text that we examine by means of visual and textual sequence analysis. Our research results reveal that women are depicted as sensually attractive and self-confidently professional while at the same time being relegated to an exclusively female sphere within (but not beyond) which they wield authority and influence. As such, femininity is represented as self-empowering, but only within a specific, postfeminist framework. This ambivalent depiction of women’s agency challenges conservative Evangelical values at the same time as it affirms them. In this sense, the study contributes the growing body of literature on gender and Evangelicalism.
Highlights
In this article, we are concerned with the ways in which femininity is represented in images and texts on conservative Christian websites
Drawing from gender studies, discourses on postfeminism, as well as on research on women in Evangelicalism, which are outlined we use visual and textual sequence analysis (Betz and Kirchner 2016; Oevermann et al 1979), briefly introduced in the third section, to analyze a range of images and textual components found on the landing page of the “Ladies Lounge 2021” website
We argue that the representation of femininity on the Ladies Lounge landing page—and, by extension, within the International Christian Fellowship (ICF)—is more than a mere blurring of boundaries between religion and popular culture
Summary
We are concerned with the ways in which femininity is represented in images and texts on conservative Christian websites. We argue that the representation of femininity on the Ladies Lounge landing page—and, by extension, within the ICF—is more than a mere blurring of boundaries between religion and popular culture (in the sense of Entgrenzung) On the contrary, it should be understood as an act of religious marking (Markierung) by way of using popular culture to subtly communicate conservative religious values and societal worldviews. The analysis to follow will focus on the online representations of femininity in the framework of a specific ICF format: The Ladies Lounge, an annual event geared towards female members that consists, among other elements, of motivational speeches by popular female pastors, including the ICF’s own senior co-pastor Susanna Bigger and other congregational leaders; large worship gatherings; and opportunities for women to network and connect informally.
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