{"title":"On Becoming and Being a ‘Living Testimony of Change’: Masculinity, Gender Activism, and Pentecostalism in South Africa","authors":"Franziska Duarte dos Santos","doi":"10.1163/15700666-12340173","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Building on ethnographic research, this article explores the significance of narrative accounts, namely testimonies and confessions, in the social project of creating reformed men in urban and peri-urban settings of present-day South Africa. By drawing attention to certain ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1953) between Pentecostalism and gender activism, it analyses how gender activists use testimonies of personal transformation to influence other men to change their self-understanding as men, their attitudes, and patterns of behaviour. Throughout the article I elaborate on the socially integrative and disintegrative effects of this endeavour as well as on the difference between such testimonial accounts and confessions. By exploring the distinction between these two forms of speaking out, the article illustrates what it means to be a gender activist in this context, and what ideas about personhood are deployed in gender activism.","PeriodicalId":45604,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700666-12340173","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"RELIGION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Building on ethnographic research, this article explores the significance of narrative accounts, namely testimonies and confessions, in the social project of creating reformed men in urban and peri-urban settings of present-day South Africa. By drawing attention to certain ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1953) between Pentecostalism and gender activism, it analyses how gender activists use testimonies of personal transformation to influence other men to change their self-understanding as men, their attitudes, and patterns of behaviour. Throughout the article I elaborate on the socially integrative and disintegrative effects of this endeavour as well as on the difference between such testimonial accounts and confessions. By exploring the distinction between these two forms of speaking out, the article illustrates what it means to be a gender activist in this context, and what ideas about personhood are deployed in gender activism.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Religion in Africa was founded in 1967 by Andrew Walls. In 1985 the editorship was taken over by Adrian Hastings, who retired in 1999. His successor, David Maxwell, acted as Executive Editor until the end of 2005. The Journal of Religion in Africa is interested in all religious traditions and all their forms, in every part of Africa, and it is open to every methodology. Its contributors include scholars working in history, anthropology, sociology, political science, missiology, literature and related disciplines. It occasionally publishes religious texts in their original African language.