Media, Gender and Religious Authority: Evangelical women in Brazil and Argentina

• Grant number: 24/14700-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ronaldo Romulo Machado de Almeida
• Grantee: Olívia Bandeira de Melo Carvalho
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to develop a multi-sited ethnography of the consumption and use of media by evangelical women and their families in a comparative perspective between Brazil and Argentina. The comparison is relevant due to the neighboring countries' different social, historical, and political contexts, with a smaller and more recent growth in the number of evangelicals in Argentina and lower participation of this group in the country's politics. Based on the theoretical-methodological concept of "lived religion," I set out to understand how the media are part of the dynamics that articulate religion, gender, and politics in the daily lives of evangelical women. In this conception, the media are understood as "material culture" or sensory forms intrinsic to religious experience and the processes of subjectivization. The ethnography considers both the places where these media are consumed (church, home environment, etc.) and online spaces such as social networks. Analyzing the consumption of religious and secular products and their relationship with the exercise of religious authority is a relevant way of understanding how people negotiate their belonging and worldviews and exercise agency. The hypothesis is that religiosity has been experienced from multiple communicational mediations that include both the production carried out by leaders - with greater or lesser visibility - and by agents who are not affiliated with religious institutions, generating tensions about religious authority and new forms of institutionality and religious belonging.