"Vocation in the Flesh": Gender and Embodiment in the Religious Anthropology of Modern Catholicism (original) (raw)

In the early and medieval Christian tradition, the gendered body was understood as an obstacle to the cultivation of virtues on the one hand, and as a potential medium for transgressions on the other. Contemporary Catholic anthropology has another view of the subject' s body and its senses and desires. This article is concerned with the pastoral project of increasing vocations and the way it is realized within Russian Catholic parishes. It also focuses on its rhetoric, placing significant emphasis on gendered embodiment. Based on participant observation materials and interviews with Catholics who have been "called," the author analyzes the strategies for making a calling to celibacy genuine and persuasive. By including gender and sexuality within the concept of vocation, such rhetoric not only makes it possible to show consecrated life as something attractive, intelligible, and real, but also to raise awareness of true masculinity and femininity. Even though church discipline prescribes solitude, in this rhetoric, celibacy does not require one to become a disembodied and asexual angel. Conversely, by applying gendered embodiment, religious specialists aim to emphasize its utmost importance for vocation, which presupposes celibacy, thereby confronting both the early Christian perspective on the sinful body and secular views on constructed gender.

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