Sacred Patriarchy and Spatial Discipline in Holy Women: A Foucauldian Feminist Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates sacred patriarchy as a disciplinary formation that regulates the bodies, spaces and subjectivities of holy women of various Catholic, Protestant and Islamic traditions. The study is rooted in the historical and ongoing marginalization of women in institutionalized religion and focuses on a gap in cross-traditional feminist religious studies. The theoretical framework theories and retheorises the concepts of Michel Foucault on disciplinary power, the panopticon, docile bodies and technologies of the self, feminist theological critique, spatial theory, and intersectional feminist analysis. The study uses qualitative approach with the main analytical tool being Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and feminist textual and visual discourse analysis. The primary texts (15 religious and institutional, 10 policy and regulatory, and 12 representational) were purposively selected using maximum variation sampling, across three traditions, three geographic regions, and three historical periods, and yielded data. The results show that sacred space is a unified panoptic instrument of patriarchal oppression; holy femininity is a discursive construction historically produced with the purpose of naturalizing gender hierarchy through its practice of obedience, silence, and self-abnegation; and the holy women are strategically compliant, yet still exhibit stubborn tactical agency through their own practice of mystical counter-discourse and collective institutional resistance. The study makes a theoretical, methodological, and empirical addition to feminist religions studies.