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“We will Vote with our Feet”: Coptic Women Contest Liturgical Exclusions Off and Online
Abstract
In this paper, I trace a burgeoning movement of Coptic women who are contesting gendered liturgical exclusions, recording themselves singing the liturgical song only their male peers can sing and sharing them online. Others have initiated a Facebook page petitioning the Church to allow woman to actively participate during liturgical services, pointing to the position of deaconesses in the Syrian and Armenian Orthodox Churches as evidence of their shared history. In growing North American “missionary” Coptic Orthodox Churches, spaces that target new converts and provide English-only services, some women have even managed to bypass liturgical restrictions leading male cantors though again, they are restricted singing non-liturgical hymns at the end of the service. Drawing on both virtual and “off-line” ethnography, I ask: how do Coptic women’s sounded experiences in the church, and increasingly in what Jennifer Brinkerhoff calls “digital diasporas” question some of the Church’s traditional values around gender, voice, and the pious singing body? And, how have Coptic women depended on what she calls “selective acculturation” (Brinkerhoff 2016), picking and choosing from North American discourses on piety and gender, to navigate their own hyphenated identities outside of Egypt? In this project, I illustrate how women are increasingly challenging these assumed inaudibilities in Coptic contexts, levying their own expertise of Coptic liturgical hymns to forge new sounded spaces in the Coptic Church, off and online. And in the face of systemic patriarchy, these women engage in a strategy Copts have long used to navigate systemic religious discrimination in Egypt: they leave. Or they withdraw to create their own virtual singing spaces, reevaluating and reinventing alternative gendered identities online. While not all women choose to part with the Church, many are increasingly vocal about the gender reckoning that is now challenging the Orthodox institution. In the words of one interlocutor: “in the end, we will vote with our feet. We will walk out of the church.” While not all women choose to part with the Church, many are increasingly vocal about the gender reckoning that is now challenging the Orthodox institution.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Ethnomusicology