The ideology of idoneousness: Mary Anne Hilton and Mercedes Gutierrez as symbols of women’s exclusion from spaces of power in Chilean Pentecostalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes the ideology of idoneousness as one of the Pentecostal principles that explain the forms taken by the integration of women in structures of religious power. Their access to and exclusions from power in Chilean Pentecostalism is concealed through the sexualisation of roles based on the stronger masculine/weaker feminine (virile/mulieris) duality, underpinned by the head/hand organic frame. This conceptual proposal was complemented with Pierre Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism, and focuses on two women who formed part of the foundational myth of Pentecostalism: Mary Anne Hilton and Mercedes Gutierrez. In our methodology we included the analysis of the two institutional journals from the early history of the Pentecostal church history in Chile, namely: Chile Pentecostal (1910–1927 and from (1933–1979), and Fuego de Pentecostés (1928–2019).