“Em todo tempo mulher foi tapete”: a escrevivência de um corpo rebarbado sobre as relações assimétricas de gênero na Assembleia de Deus em Boa Esperança - PA

Abstract

This text summarizes part of the results of the research I have been developing since 2018 and focuses on discussions regarding women's leadership in the evangelical church Assembly of God. The institution, founded in 1911, in Belém do Pará, over the years spread to other states outside the Amazon of Pará and is currently present in all Brazilian states. Starting from a colonialist bias, the church built its hierarchy on the sacralization of gender inequality, reserving subservient roles for women, especially black women, and not allowing them to ascend in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This factor endorses the androcentric stance of the church which, in its 110 years of founding, never consecrated women to positions of ecclesiastical leadership, even though it had a woman as a pioneer in the founding of the church and a majority black female audience. Seeking to develop writing skills, as proposed by Conceição Evaristo, I defined as an “ethnographic research field” the Christian community of which I am a “deviant member”, whose headquarters are in Boa Esperança, in the rural area of ​the municipality of Santarém, in the west of Pará. More specifically, the work developed through dialogue between the researcher and the members of the Prayer Circle. In short, this text is about how the structures of oppression that act on women's bodies and their subjectivities operate within the church.