“I Left My Bible At Home…”: Evangelical Women’s Bodies as Biblical Text in the Workplace during the 1980s
Gender and Sacred Textures - Entanglements of Materiality, Embodiment, and Sacred Texts in Religious Identities - Marianne Schleicher
Rachel E. C. Beckley
University of Kansas
Description
Evangelical affiliated periodicals serve as an important source to document how evangelical women coped with the absence of material markers of evangelicalism once they entered secular workplaces in the United States during the 1980s. In these affiliated periodicals, women writers legitimize their entry into the workforce with parable writing and storytelling that exemplify to their female readers how they can exhibit their evangelical identity and engage in evangelization by embodying motifs and narratives from the Bible. Theoretically, the article leans on Judith Butler and Karen Barad’s understandings of performativity, which is why the article asks: what acts did evangelical women engage in, how did affiliated periodicals intra-act with and thus have an effect on the construction of evangelical women’s identity, and how did these acts relate to the Bible? These questions are directed at evangelical affiliated periodicals from the 1980s, especially Shirley Schreiner Taylor’s parable “God Protects His Sheep among the Wolves” from the February 1989 issue of Word and Work.