Theorized Bodies: Black Pentecostal Women Preaching

Theorized Bodies
When women put on vestments and stand behind the podium, they face a conflict in the art of delivery: What gendered behaviors can they show? Who can they be?[1]

The Gendered Body
The art of preaching which takes place on pulpit space is grossly concerned with gendered relationships, generally privileging males over females, masculinity over femininity. The historical purview of women's bodies deemed them inappropriate to occupy the pulpit space. Even contemporarily, because of the body's anatomy, constructed spaces either allow or limit access to those spaces. "Women's bodies are associated with natural inferiority and reproductive functions, and their confinement to the private spheres of community has been predicated in part on their sexual difference. Because preaching primarily occurs in the public sphere, women have long been banned from its participation"[2]. Lawless corroborates this idea by saying that the home was the domain of womanhood, certainly the realm of the private[3].

Based on the construction of the body, women have been given a particular "place" of silence, particularly through Christian rhetoric[4]. Mountford elucidates this: "To have one's 'place' be silence makes no sense unless we imagine silence attached to a rhetorical situation that necessarily involves material space…The trope of 'place' makes social position and physical location interchangeable"[5]. Apparently, the construction of bodies performs the religious function of establishing and maintaining limits and boundaries. The very body is a way in which religio-social mobility is imagined and through which this mobility becomes possible, giving the ability for some bodies to speak and others to be silent. As such, when an unanticipated body transgresses the space of the pulpit, not only can the religio-social imaginary shift by virtue of the performing body, but the literal meaning of sacred space as well as the meaning of religious boundaries can transform.

Normative gendered behavior stands at the center of the pulpit and bodies must cohere through their proximity to these centers. This has different affects on women and men. Men must inhabit this center and women must stand uniquely away from it, not "preaching like a man," or acting too "mannish" in the pulpit[6]. Even for women who are praised for not preaching like a man, masculinity is the centering trope, deeming it as normative, special and standard. Women are praised for their approach to masculinity, but only insofar as this approach is filled with fear and trembling of the power contained in masculinity's center. As masculinity stands as a centering trope, all other gendered performances become marginal and subaltern. Still, women within black Pentecostalism have found a "place" in the pulpit.

It appears that black women in Pentecostal pulpits do not merely act like men, misread specular performers, but must preach through masculinity as obstacle and construct. Questions of mannishness bespeak issues of authenticity, truth telling and the possibility of shame for and of the woman's body. Is the body preaching really a woman or is she a man in drag, a specular, spectacular performer at best; is she really being herself? Though the pulpit is a contested rhetorically masculine location, black Pentecostal women's performance on that space must contend with queer readings of their bodies: they are lesbians until proven innocent (similar to black women's performance of preaching in other denominations to be sure)[7].

It seems that women preach like men all of the time with grunts, guttural gestures, groans, movements of the body, sweating, speaking in tongues and the like. When one speaks of liking or disliking a particular woman preacher because of her proximity to mannishness, it buttresses the sacred nature of manhood and masculinity and reifies the supposed danger of and possible contamination from everything feminine. Women said to preach like men intimate the terror located in the idea that masculinity can be lost. In this way, the excesses of the performance of preaching are gendered. This articulates the fear of gender constructions which can be easily accessed and slipped into if the bodily stylizations are mimicked and appropriated within contested spaces during particular times. Simply, if the Holy Ghost empowers the woman's performance of preaching rightfully without scorn, then women can live, breathe and behave like men elsewhere.

Briefly, it must be noted that the pulpit is also a production of racial normativity as well. As the pulpit was not created to anticipate the woman's body, it certainly was not created with the black body in mind. This is doubly true for the black woman's body. This particular body is marginalized, not only by virtue of gender but finds particularly raced oppression as well. The black woman's body has been and is continually imagined as hypersexualized through what Brooks calls "pornotroping"[8]. She states that "black women's bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden of spectacular (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture"[9]. It is this imagined pornographic body that presents itself to preach when the black woman mounts the pulpit.

The Shifting Body
In black Pentecostalism, I posit that the pulpit functions as shifting space and is not a static up there in front of the church, high and lifted up, though the potential energy of the space remains in that set-apart location. Building on the notion of spatial genitals and vernacular gender, I include the idea of "rhetorical spaces" as put forward by Mountford which are not "fanciful or fixed locations" and are read through people's "social expectations"[10]. Theologically, because Pentecostalism posits that the believer does not only behave differently on Sunday but lives her entire day-to-day life empowered by the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost is not confined to moments of spirit possession but is embodied in the believer.

The Pentecostal "pulpit" allows for one to move around, to be excessive, to make use of the entire sacred place as holy ground. All ground can be holy ground because the spirit of God will be there in the believer. The physically built pulpit becomes a marker of sacred meaning, pulsating with the notion of sanctification of space but not exhaustive within those spaces only. As such, the pulpit for black women is produced through the entanglements of vernacular gender performance shifting spatial genitals, allowing multiple performances of interpretation. The black Pentecostal pulpit, then, is a production of the commingling of human body, timing and contextual intention with the referential point of access being the physically built pulpit location.

Simply, when preaching, the performer is not confined to the lectern but can preach from anywhere within the church. It is not unusual for the preacher to leave the lectern, to walk across the floor, the walk up and down the aisles, to sit on the pulpit steps, to stand on pews and the like when preaching. This movement displays an intimacy with the audience as well as a spirited individual.

In black Pentecostal groups that do not ordain women, historically, many allowed them to preach or teach from the floor instead of the pulpit, though this practice is not as standard today[11]. However, it seems that they performed the same work of a male preacher through the idea that the rhetorical space contains the social expectation congregants' thoughts of what it means for one to preach. All spaces can be "pulpitized" by the preacher/performer through social expectations, performers doing preaching work in black Pentecostalism.

As such, it looks as if all bodies can become bodies which preach through the one empowering apparatus: the Holy Ghost. Simply, because the pulpit was imagined as shifting, as a space that could be in the aisle, on the floor, or the literal built "pulpit," women were able to preach from other locations and thus, transgress the physical and rhetorical meaning of preaching. This transgression is literally a "movement outside of the proper"[12]. For this reason, I believe women were ordained as pastors and preachers in black Pentecostal denominations at a rigorous level long before many of the more mainstream black denominations[13].

What information is transferred through the black woman's body in the preaching moment? The body becomes the site for preserving the structures and meanings which resonate in black Pentecostal pulpits – what Mahmood terms the "virtues, ethical capacities, and forms of reasoning" – while concurrently being a body which contests those very apparatuses of power[14]. Through "opaque acts," – which Brooks defines as "dark points of possibility" – black women's bodies can become the occasion for reconfiguring the very meanings of what it means to be black, woman and preacher within the pulpit space[15]. In this way, vernacular gender expressions are invoked though the spatial genitals of the pulpit as a contested site and stands in opposition to this opacity.

Preaching as an art and as a spatial action is fraught with gendered norms and expectations: "As with the rhetorical space of the pulpit, the art is based on the presumed authority and status of one gender"[16]. Of course, this centered gender is male; the centered gender performance, masculinity. As this is the case, women find their bodies in a precarious entanglement of approaches towards multiple centers. She must approach the center of femininity at a different rate than the center of masculinity. She is expected to exemplify all of those womanly characteristics of weakness of flesh, porosity, sacrifice, motherhood, gentleness and caring[17]. However, in order to perform Pentecostal preaching well, she must also display those virtues which are given through empowerment of the Holy Ghost which are normally associated with masculinity: authority, power, intellect, rationality.

Again, briefly turning to theology of Pentecostalism, I want to highlight how the body is a permeable entity, porous, allowing the Holy Ghost in (and, quite possibly, out). Although once someone "gets the Holy Ghost" through Pentecostal baptism the Holy Ghost resides in the believer's body and there is little discussion of it leaving save through "backsliding" (i.e., unbelief), the body is one that allows access and entry. What else is permeable and unbounded in Pentecostal discourse? It appears that the shifting space of the pulpit mirrors the permeable and unbounded nature of the physical body, allowing entry and access to the one that tarries, to the one that literally waits for the spirit's unction.

As such, black women's bodies in Pentecostal pulpits literally shift and reestablish boundaries, becoming oppositional forces to the very idea of religion as boundary creating and maintaining, challenging the iconographic status of masculinity. The terror of women in the pulpit is the terror of the loss of religious ideology and coherence. This demonstrates: "Each figure developed a means to move more freely and to be culturally at 'odds,' to turn the tables on normativity and to employ their own bodies as canvasses of dissent in popular performance culture"[18]. Plainly, the black woman's performance of her body as the preaching body becomes the illustration of the shaky ground upon which religious authority is built.

Queer theory theorizes the shifting nature and instability of identity. As such, identity always remains an in process entity as well as a process of citationality. Simply put, identity implicates an eschatological body; one that cites the past from which a current identity coheres and one that moves towards a future, not yet realized, accepted or lived reality. It is a process of recognizing, reconciling, reckoning, recovering and refashioning oneself or group. As such, I postulate that both the pulpit and women's performance on the shifting pulpit are indeed queer. The literal shifts in the their bodies while preaching as well as the notion of the shifting space of the pulpit beckons a consideration of subjectivity, of new possibilities for what it means to be black, woman as well as the sense of the pulpit.

Excursus: On the Grounds

In this section, I turn to a brief analysis of three black women Pentecostal preachers. I hope to demonstrate how vernacular gender expressions coupled with the notion of spatial genitals give different occasions for empowerment and agency for the subjects; agency is invoked through space, body and context. All three are "pastors" with set congregations and particular spaces from which they preach on a continual basis. Still, they also function as itinerant preachers, traveling to preach messages[19]. Looking at these three specific examples will not give us a comprehensive understanding of black Pentecostal women preachers in pulpits, but they will allow us to have a fruitful dialogue regarding particular instances of vernacular gender working with, or possibly against, spatial genitals. Moreover, they will give context to which the theories hypothesized can be tested.

Baby Suggs, holy's pulpit, as told in the novel Beloved, is the Clearing, a natural space in the woods[20]. Though a fictive character, I include her in the realm of Pentecostal preachers because of the ways in which she privileges the body and emotions as mediums through which connection with the Divine can be established in her sermon. Because of the rhetoric of nature being feminized, it poses an intriguing set of issues that her preaching takes place in what is thought of as feminine space. This particular location is a "natural environment, not a product of human hands," consistent with themes of pregnancy, birth and the like[21].

In this particular case, the pulpit space of nature looks back on the subjectivity of Baby Suggs, holy, transforming her into a woman of the earth. She is situated in a location that is public and private; public because the land belongs to everyone and is not owned by anyone yet private because it is deep within the woods, yielding to concealment. Baby Suggs's preaching gives rise to the conflation of boundaries; not only of space but of rhetoric which she espouses. It is not a generally "Christian" message she preaches because she doesn't privilege notions of sin and sacrifice, nor does she talk about Jesus. Rather, she speaks about loving the body which certainly resonates in black Pentecostal thought with the dancing, shouting, crying, hollering and display of bodily and emotional ecstasy encouraged. This love for the body causes her own to cohere as relevant and personal within the space of the Clearing.

Bishop Iona Locke of Detroit, Michigan is pastor of Abyssinia Christ Centered Ministries. I contend that she is a preacher that does not try to rupture the universal claims of Pentecostalism but uses those claims in order to stand in the pulpit. The cartographic region from which her vernacular gendered behavior arises purposefully forecloses and exists within the normative structures of power as opposed to standing over and against them.

She can contend that the spirit of God has been poured out on all flesh, allowing her access to the pulpit space. However, the sexual ethic through which she preaches is conservative, mirroring heterornormative and homophobic assumptions about the function and usages of sex and the body. This shunts possibilities for subaltern sexual voices to find agency except through the dismissal of the erotic selves[22]. One wonders: Has she had to undergo this dismissal of the erotic to engage the pulpit herself? Through spatial genitals, Locke's body is interpolated through the masculine space of the pulpit as approaching the masculine center but not trying to occupy it or ambiguously reside too close to it.

Lastly is Bishop Yvette Flunder of San Francisco, California. Flunder is pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ, is a bishop within this denomination and is a black lesbian with roots in the Pentecostal tradition. She preaches what she terms a "radically inclusive" doctrine which gives voice and power to many marginalized groups including the LGBTQ community and the differently-abled. She says, "I preach to a desparate [sic] people, who are struggling to make sense of their lives on the margins of society. They are my beloved"[23].

As a preacher, she literally disrupts the normative assumptions of what it means to be a "woman" in the pulpit. When she preaches, she often speaks about how Pentecost is about radical inclusion and how that event in the book of Acts set the stage for people like her to occupy the pulpit. She does not aspire to uphold heteronormative ideas regarding gender roles and expectations; neither does she hold normative notions of "church" or the pulpit and about Pentecostalism or more generally, about religious boundaries. Rather, she dissents in all these discourses. She preaches both to and from the "edge,"[24] from the margins and willfully does not try to stand in the centerering, dismissive, abusive, normative tropes.

All three figures approach and/or resist the approach towards multiple centers during the preaching moment within the shifting space of the black Pentecostal pulpit. Though difference in theological and doctrinal beliefs could be exhausted elsewhere merely hinted at above, this exploration is more concerned with the similarities in how their bodies as black women's bodies occupy pulpit space. How do these women each "translate and transform" pulpits and their bodies through the reciprocal performances of their bodies on the pulpits and the pulpits on their bodies[25]?

The preaching moment for these women preachers becomes a time for critical (re)making of the self, working in concert with an audience and a space. Not only do they (re)make themselves, but the congregants hear and are convicted to live their own lives differently; the pulpit space is reimagined as built for the woman's disruptive, dissenting body. These three women conflate and pervert boundaries established for black women's bodies, for pulpits and for the meaning of religion and sacred space generally[26]. As these boundaries are blurred, the stability of religious truth is interrogated.

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[1] Mountford 70.
[2] Mountford, 9.
[3] Lawless, 158-60.
[4] See I Corinthians xiv:xxxiv and I Timothy ii:xi in which the Apostle Paul states that women are to keep silence in churches. These statements have been used as universal injunctions for women, claiming that bodies constructed as such are not suitable for speaking in churches. Vernacular gendered behavior takes seriously these injunctions while using a contextual (situated) approach to the text, asserting that there are instances when women can and should speak in churches even in the capacity of preacher. [5] Mountford, 27.[6] Best.
[7] Best discusses this idea in chapter 6, demonstrating that both Elder Lucy Smith and Rev. Mary Evans were both imagined and historically contested as possible lesbians simply because they were preachers.
[8] Brooks, 5. See also Collins, Patricia Hill Black Feminist Thought and Douglas, Kelly Brown Sexuality and the Black Church.
[9] Brooks, 7.
[10] Mountford, 16; 17.
[11] In the Church of God in Christ, for example, when visiting churches during my youth, many times women would preach from the floor. I recall my mother preaching at particular churches which would invite her to preach from the floor whereas others would state emphatically that the pulpit was "open" for women to sit on, prepare and to preach from. Still, in the COGIC, women generally are able to preach from the space demarked as the pulpit.
[12] Mountford, 65.
[13] Best; see also Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks in Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as Townsend Gilkes, Cheryl in If It Wasn't for the Women...: Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (New York: Orbis Books, 2000).
[14] Mahmood, "Rehearsed", 829.
[15] Brooks, Daphne, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006) 8.
[16] Mountford, 64.
[17] See Lawless's discussion of "mothering congregations" (ch. 3) and that of maternal strategies and usage of reproductive imagery (ch. 5).
[18] Brooks, 6.
[19] Lawless gives a wonderful account of the differences between women evangelists and pastors. That chapter was particularly helpful for thinking through the voices of the pastors I analyze. Though outside the context of this paper to analyze the rhetoric of specific sermons from these pastors, it would be useful for another undertaking.
[20] Morrison, Toni, Beloved
[21] Mountford, 20.
[22] In the sermon "Let's Get it On," (Intersound Records, November 8, 1994) she quips, "Why I got to look at you and wonder if you male or female," displaying the terror of sexual ambiguity.
[23] See Flunder, Yvette, "Who is this Preacher?" Refuge Ministries, Online. Internet. http://www.sfrefuge.org/sermonintro.html (accessed December 11, 2006)
[24] Ibid.
[25] Brooks, 156.
[26] Brooks, 2.