Gender, Religion, and J-Roc
October 10, 2009 § Leave a comment
Christianity has a long history of being a female-gendered religion. I would suggest this derives from the early Christian Church, which saw men and women as equals. It was only the rise of the Vatican in Rome that saw the gradual dissolution of women’s roles in the church.
In the late 19th century, throughout the British Empire, including Canada, there was a massive reinvigoration of mainline Protestant churches. In part, this was driven by the concept of “muscular Christianity”, a doctrine that was used to justify and extend the British imperial project. According to this doctrine, the (white) British Christian man was to give his body and soul over to Jesus. His body was to be his temple. The muscular Christian, then, could be found all over the British Empire, in Africa, in India, extending British dominion over a usually recalcitrant populace. He could also be found in the inner-city of London and Manchester, as well as Montréal and Toronto. The Americans got into the act, too. Indeed, the rise of organised sport, largely centred around Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School and the ubiquitous sport, derived from muscular Christianity, as did the Boy Scouts movement of Lord Baden-Powell in the late 19th century.
But this masculinised Christianity arose in response to the feminisation of these mainline Protestant churches. Women were always the more devout, the ones who actually went to mass, and they began to create space for themselves within the parish, within the church itself. Women’s auxiliaries, in particular, but also other organisations. The Catholic Church, at least in Québec got involved, too, creating groups that were female-centric. The fact that these churches would become feminised is not all that surprising, in many ways. Women were left without recreative spaces through the rise of industrialisation and the middle classes in the 19th century. The advent of domestic servants for large swaths of the population meant that these women had less to do.
Just as their husbands’ masculinity had to change and take into account their new sedentary employment as managers, these bourgeois women’s femininity also shifted. They were no longer so much caregivers and housekeepers, they had free time. But they lived in a world where their public excursions and causes were always going to be limited due to the dominant patriarchal ideals of the day. There were concerns about their safety and security, about the “delicate nature of the fairer sex.” Thus, the church became the ideal location for women. What safer place could there be than God’s house? And so the parish (or whatever you want to call it in whatever Christian church you want to talk about) became this feminised space, just for women.
And men were turned off by the church, hence the response of muscular Christianity.
Recently, I exchanged emails with my CTlab colleague, Marisa Urgo, about American jihadists, and she noted something kind of interesting. She suggested that it makes sense that bored (white) suburban youth in the US would be intrigued by Islam, as it is a very masculine religion, when compared to Christianity. While I am not so interested in the consequences of this, it’s not my area of expertise, I do find the idea of gender and religion really interesting. The fact that a particular disaffected segment of white, suburban youth would be attracted to the masculinist vision of radical Islam is fascinating for all sorts of reasons.
I think there’s also something to be said for the exotic here, much like white suburban boys in the late 80s/early 90s got so fascinated by gangsta rap coming out of Los Angeles and New York City. This was when I was a teenager, and whilst I love hip hop, I never quite understood these guys who became so obsessed with not just the music, but the alleged lifestyle of gangsta rappers, to the point where they began to not only dress like Easy-E and Ice Cube, but they began to commit petty crime and to act like idiots, so that they could be gangsta. You know the type, like J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys
we’re #4!!!
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
the un released its human development index rankings today. canada ranks as the 4th best place in the world to live. not so bad, i suppose, to be ranked #4. it ranks after norway, australia, and iceland. but i find this kind of disturbing, really. norway, fine. i’ve got nothing against norway, nor really australia, either. but iceland? iceland is practically bankrupt, one of the hardest hit nations in the world during the current economic meltdown that we may or may not be recovering from. how that can be translated into a #3 rating is beyond me. but i guess the economy is only part of the hdi, but i do wonder what will happen to iceland next year. and to be fair, iceland did fall from 1st to 3rd this year.
meanwhile, canada. canada spent a long time atop the annual hdi. in 1992, and from 1994 right through to 2000, this was the best place in the world to live, at least as measured by the compilation of statistics by the un. but, hey, that’s not a bad thing. canada was the first dynasty of the hdi, which the un only began publishing in 1990. norway is the current dynasty, having been first from 2001-2006 and now this year, its reign only punctuated by iceland’s two chart toppers in 2007 and 2008.
and whilst canada is by no means a poor place to live, its measurement in the hdi has consistently ranked it in the top 10, most often in the top 5. but this slippage does get me worried in some ways. canada tends to fall down these rankings due to its poor record vis-à-vis the aboriginal population and the vast amount of poverty on reserves around the country, as well as the incredibly difficult circumstances aboriginals in urban areas tend to face. and yet, and yet…every government in the past decade has sworn to do better by the aboriginal population. and every government does nothing. last week, the globe & mail visited what it called “ground zero” of the h1n1 outbreak in canada, an indian reserve at wasagamack, manitoba. wasagamack is an incredibly isolated community, 600 km north of winnipeg, a trip made by air and water taxi.
wasagamack made headlines last month because health canada sent out 200 body bags instead of supplies to fight a possible outbreak of h1n1. this was a great insult, because death is taboo in aboriginal culture, death is not prepared for, death is dealt with when it arrives, but not beforehand.
at any rate, as the newspaper article shows, this nation lags on dealing with the very real threat against the human rights of canadian aboriginals. i have been on reserves in various parts of this country, and in some cases, conditions are appalling. and spare me the rightwing argument they only have themselves to blame. that is utter bullshit. reserves were created on marginal land the country over. traditional ways of life were discouraged by the government, languages were lost, and so on. when “modern” housing was promised, the results were disappointing. places like wasagamck have homes inundated with mould, improper sanitation, like no running water, broken windows, and sagging foundations.
this is a national embarrassment. i recall, back when i worked on aboriginal claims, canada 2000. i lived in ottawa, and i was working on a claim that involved the forced removal of several groups of inuit in northern manitoba and what is now nunavut to new locations. the government, in some cases, claimed it was due to the need for food. the caribou, which the southern inuit relied upon for food, had changed their migration patterns and were experiencing a dip in their population. but rather than let the inuit track their new routes south and west of their location, they were moved to churchill, manitoba, where they were put on the dole and disease stalked them. further north, the inuit were moved around the arctic like pawns on a chessboard for the government, as a means of shoring up canadian sovereignty in the arctic during the cold war (aboriginals and the arctic are two issues in canadian politics where politicians talk the talk but continually fail to walk the walk). and so here i was in ottawa in 2000, 40 years after these events up north. and all i could feel was revulsion at my country, that this was allowed to happen.
one civil servant at northern affairs canada argued, quite forcefully, that the government had done the right thing, that it knew better than the inuit as to how to survive. i was dumbfounded, i was astounded that this attitude still existed in the government.
and meanwhile, each successive government talks about improving the quality of life of aboriginals on and off reserves. and each government fails. even the current conservative government, with a minister of health, leona aglukkaq, who is an inuit from nunavut, has continued to fail. indeed, it was aglukkaq’s government which sent out the body bags to wasagamack.
Matthew Barlow 