Embodied spiritualities: Beliefs,practices,and contributions of women’s spiritualities in Latin America

Abstract

The analysis of women and their ways of experiencing embodied spirituality has revealed novel forms in the configurations of believing, practicing, and belonging to spiritual communities. Through the systematization of ethnographic and multi-sited explorations conducted in women’s circles in Mexico, this article reflects on how the rise of what is now known as feminine spirituality has contributed to shaping forms of belief, practice, and belonging to spiritual communities outside institutional margins. It analyzes the impact of feminine spirituality and its approach to understanding contemporary spiritualities in Latin America, as well as some of its challenges, themes, and key issues. It shows how women’s spiritual expressions generate epistemic and theoretical-methodological questions, but also allow for the articulation of socio-anthropological approaches to spirituality and religion with other perspectives of social analysis.

Introduction

Although women have been active subjects in religious spaces, their visibility and problematization as agents of the spiritual is relatively recent. This visibility began with approaches to their participation and representation in institutionalized religions, and subsequently, the role of women proved key to understanding the diversification, pluralization, and strengthening of religious and spiritual offerings around the world. Today, talking about women and their specifically spiritual practices is still a subject of debate and questioning, especially when these are inscribed on the margins of institutions and under criteria that challenge the logic of religious norms.

Women’s spiritualities, from their analysis, have revealed a series of social phenomena that were previously perceived as peripheral or unrelated to religion and its manifestations. Addressing spiritual rituals and repertoires has allowed for the identification of links, limits, and differences regarding the participation and recognition of women in the construction of the sacred; but it has also opened debates on how to think about beliefs from perspectives beyond the religious field, its agents, and theories.

This article reflects on how the rise of what is now known as feminine spirituality has contributed to shaping forms of believing, practicing, and belonging to spiritual communities outside institutional margins. Through ethnographic and multi-sited explorations conducted in women’s circles in Mexico, and the recovery of contributions from studies in Latin America, this article analyzes the impact of feminine spirituality and its approach to understanding contemporary spiritualities, as well as some of the challenges, themes, and debates surrounding this spiritual expression.

Women and their spirituality: The consolidation of their legitimacy as agents

The recognition of women’s importance has had significant implications for the analysis of social phenomena, and the study of religious forms and spiritualities has been no exception. Tuñón (1990) mentions that the inclusion of women, their history, and the history of gender has been a process of light and shadow that has allowed us to problematize how and why women become invisible in the analysis of social phenomena even when their participation in them has been active and shaping. The inclusion of women as historical subjects who make history, and in this case, who are part of and take part in religions and spiritualities, has modified the uniformity of analyses, making visible other factors that shape beliefs and practices. Looking at a gendered subject, with a differentiated body and that, moreover, has been subordinated or erased from social and religious grammar, shows that this construction of subalternity and radical otherness is not a natural state of the social sciences or of the socio-anthropological analysis of religions and their expressions, but rather a social and gender construction that sciences have also reproduced from their approaches.

Hence, thinking about the inclusion, naming, and analysis of women and their role in shaping the religious field implies an epistemological work that recognizes them as agents of change and legitimate subjects of knowledge, questioning the misogyny that erased their contributions to the field or constructed them as residual subjects in social phenomena. This change, which has been built very much in tandem with the circulation and appropriation of feminist epistemologies in the social field, and applied specifically to the religious field, has not been free of tensions. The field of religious studies and its agents frequently show reluctance to recognize women’s participation. In the case of research focused on them and their experiences from individual or collective perspectives, criticisms focus on the need to emphasize the importance of such analyses under stricter criteria, arguing the lack of scientific objectivity when incorporating affective, emotional, or bodily components of either the women or the researchers conducting the inquiries or, most frequently, dismissing the studies due to the absence of men as interlocutors instead of observing, recognizing, or analyzing the results or theoretical-methodological contributions that these investigations bring to the field.

This internalized misogyny present in the field of social and religious studies poses various challenges to the consolidation of women as legitimate subjects for the analysis of current spiritual and religious configurations. One of these is recognizing that talking about women implies expanding knowledge about them, but also knowing and understanding how their relationships with other gendered subjects, both individual and collective, are configured, and that this understanding necessarily involves methodological and conceptual reflections that allow us to point out their specificities and experiences as a field of their own.

Building from critique: Women as spiritual and religious agents in Latin America

Feminist and gender analyses that address women in religions, especially those that respond to an institutional model, have pointed to a reading in which subordination, erasure, and passivity are the central characteristics of female representations in sacred texts and how this impacts interactions and gender construction within their religious communities of belonging. This symbolic and gender construction reproduces social and cultural stereotypes which often limits women’s fields of action and participation or, at best, frames their tasks and spaces of power and decision-making to those that allow the reproduction of gender stereotypes such as care, support, and service.

It is from the questioning of feminism in the 1970s, but especially as a result of the inequality, poverty, and violence that have historically marked the region, that critical movements and expressions about the role of women and their political action from religions emerged in Latin America. One of the most important movements is Latin American Feminist Theology (TFL) which was consolidated in the 1990s.

Latin American feminist theology understands itself as a critical reflection on the experience that we women have of God within our practices that seek to transform the causes that produce impoverishment and violence against women as a social group, in order to move towards new relationships based on justice and integrity of life for women and for every organism on earth (Aquino and Támez, 1998: 16)

The TFL is distinguished by being intersectional, ecumenical, ¹ and by placing women’s experiences at the center of their theological reflections and discernment. This experience starts from shared frameworks of meaning from different religious traditions but calls, in the words of Fernández (2009), to ‘seek new answers from different spaces.’ Following De la Luz (2019), from the reinterpretation of sacred texts, feminist theologians politicize their faith experience by challenging anthropocentrism, the idea of Incarnation, and the subordination of genders.

A second movement of great relevance in the region and heir to the TFL is ecofeminism or holistic ecofeminism (Aquino and Támez, 1998: 55). Gebara (2000), one of its main exponents along with Támez (1986) and Ress (2010), mentions that ecofeminism can be considered as ‘a wisdom that attempts to recover the ecosystem and women.’ Even though there are different perspectives from which ecofeminism acts as a philosophical, political, or spiritual perspective, this positioning aims to recognize the links between the domination of women, their bodies, and nature in the capitalist system (Warren, 2003), but also the recovery of knowledge considered ancestral and the problematization of Western, dualistic, and rationalist constructions between nature and culture.

For the case developed here, spiritual ecofeminism or ecofeminist spirituality has great relevance; as it allowed for redefining the relationship with nature by highlighting ‘the sacredness of life’ that is reflected not in an otherworldly divinity, but in everyday life and in the relationship, use, and care of the earth (Mies and Shiva, 1993: 31). These reflections led to questions about the place and role of women in monotheistic religions, but also in the construction of spiritualities centered on the Goddess and the feminine. Following Binetti (2016: 51), the principles of ecofeminist spirituality are based on the importance of the body as experience and relationship with the divine, on the relational and community dimension of existence, and the protagonism of women based on a critique of the patriarchal system of religions.

The metaphor of ecofeminism is the body: we are part of a single Sacred Body. Ecofeminists are convinced that we are facing a new moment of revelation, a revelation in which human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred experience that are the cycles and processes of the planet. (Ress, 2010: 112)

Also since the 1990s, and with the increase of spiritual expressions associated with new age spiritual matrices in Latin America, women began to have another form of visibility in the spiritual landscape. However, with this, at least two movements occurred: on the one hand, the approaches made from the religious field on new age spirituality seldom considered the contributions of feminist and ecofeminist theologians in this grammar of plurality and new spiritualities; and on the other hand, spiritual theologians or ecofeminists denied the identity category of new age for being considered ‘an individualistic and self-indulgent spirituality’ (Vera and Valderrama, 2017). In this sense, both the presence and scope of feminist and ecofeminist theologies, as well as the feminized version of new age spirituality, remained concentrated in academic, social, and intellectual circuits with relationships that oscillate, even today, between collaboration, criticism, and rejection.

In this plural and tense field, the visibility of women within the framework of so-called alternative spiritualities in Latin America has been consolidated through its popularization as a relatively accessible option in the context of plurality, expansion, and mobility in the spiritual field; through their presence via socio-digital networks; and through the circulation of self-generated cultural products commercialized by agents and their circuits (from books, pedagogical tools on diverse body techniques, workshops, training, circles, among others). The presence of women in these spiritual frameworks has been documented mainly through explorations made by academics whose approaches have been multidisciplinary, multi-methodological, and with a large ethnographic, experiential, and critical component; highlighting the analyses carried out in and from Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia (Navarro, 2016; Valdés, 2017; Felitti, 2019; Felitti and Abdala, 2018 and 2022; Mira-Sarmiento, 2020; Mesquita 2021; Sarrazin and Mira-Sarmiento, 2023; Ramírez, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023). This has opened important discussions and bridges with feminist epistemologies and their reflections on sites of enunciation, on the bodily implications and lived experience that arise from processes of research and embodied knowledge, on the importance of the self or the ‘auto’ in ethnographies; and the need to reflect on the role of gender and the reproduction or questioning of roles associated with the feminine and the very notion of femininity that are constructed from these spiritual spaces.

Even with its evident advances, some of the challenges we face from the field of religious and spirituality studies has been the question of how to move beyond the reading of subordination or limited agency and problematize the experience and contributions of women in this social field from other registers. This shift would allow us to see the gender inequalities that are mobilized in the religious field, recognize the contributions of feminisms to the analysis and configuration of the religious, expand knowledge about the experience, representations, and practices of women, considering the generic and intra-generic social relations constructed within the framework of their communities of belonging and beyond them; among others. In this sense, a self-critical perspective of the scientific exercise is also necessary, where the consideration that the legitimate subjects of the religious are precisely the actors who configure it is promoted, taking into account the gender and intersectional perspective, and where situated identities and experiences are made visible.

The approach to women in spiritual and religious spaces has implied considering them as gendered agents, with concrete and diverse cultural loads, and where their experiences, emotions, and bodies are a fundamental part of their ways of embodying and creating the sacred. In this sense, I propose looking at the agents of spiritualities as those who construct their references, senses, and interactions also from the margins, that is: from spiritualities that are not necessarily institutionalized but autonomous; from considering their spiritual communities as spaces of socialization and care; from their bodies, emotions, and the senses and meanings assigned to their embodied processes; and above all from a perspective that is nourished by a situated view from Latin America, a territory that has been considered as a space of observation and study, but not hegemonic for the generation of knowledge and where there is an extensive bibliography hardly ever recognized from Anglo-Saxon readings.

Embodied spiritualities: Characteristics and situated notes on feminine spirituality

In the last decade, various studies have been developed on the so-called feminine spirituality. Thanks to explorations, mainly ethnographic and autoethnographic (Felitti and Ramírez, 2022), some of the most significant margins of this form of spirituality have been drawn. Let’s start with the agents of the spiritual: feminine spirituality is embodied by women, mainly cisgender, mostly heterosexual, with higher education, white or mestizo, and middle class. These characteristics are key in several ways. First, because this spirituality has a clear gender and bodily mark, that is, it is characterized by the centrality of embodied experience in narrative and ritual terms. Second, because many of the rituals performed within the framework of this spiritual form are anchored in the reproduction of the gender order and its stereotypes. ² And third, because it has been women with professional, middle and upper class backgrounds, with certain financial means or with certain degrees of economic independence who have approached or had access to this form of spirituality.

Even with these characteristics, and with the increasing visibility and naming of sexual and gender diversity, in recent years some spiritual spaces stereotypically characterized as ‘feminine’ have incorporated both inclusive language and opened their doors to non-binary people, to trans men and women or in the process of transitioning, and to lesbian or bisexual women. This opening, although not generalized nor free of tensions, ³ has gradually allowed the recognition of the multiplicity of spiritual experiences associated with identity and its embodied experiences, and the necessary adaptation of narrative forms that break with stereotypes, and the sexual and affective binary thinking of the spiritual discourse.

Another characteristic of these agents is that they construct and embody the model of spiritual seekers. Following Barker (2008), spiritual seekers feel the need to orient their relationship with the sacred to the sphere of everyday life in order to satisfy specific demands such as healing, psychological and material well-being, and personal growth. In this sense, the trajectories that these seekers draw in feminine spirituality are multiple and multidirectional, but share at least two characteristics. The first is that the search for and encounter with feminine spaces is not necessarily related to the spiritual. Ethnographic data has shown that illnesses, grief, losses, breakups, violent events, among other factors of an emotional and relational nature, are those that enable the searches or the creation of peer groups where experiences can be shared and where rituals of diverse origin and plural spiritual anchoring can be mobilized (Ramírez, 2020; Felitti and Abdala, 2022; Felitti and Irrazábal, 2018). The second, at least in the Mexican case, spiritual trajectories usually begin once there is a questioning of the religion of first socialization (almost always Catholic, although also and to a lesser extent Christian and Evangelical) and it is through bodily and emotional experimentation that the search is enabled.

Even when there may be other paths and trajectories, a constant is that women’s circles and female collectivities become a starting point that directs the searches. In principle because women construct and claim themselves as legitimate builders of their spirituality, but also because female and women-only socialization spaces become a real and safe alternative where their bodies, emotions, and narratives are constitutive and taken into account. This fact is particularly significant considering the context of gender violence in the region, and where safe spaces are key for accompaniment, containment, and peer encounters.

In this characterization, it stands out that, frequently, these spiritual seekers, by emphasizing well-being and healing through questioning biomedical practices, construct specific transits for learning and developing techniques that turn them into what Bobel (2010) calls holistic healers. Holistic healers are women who, through experience, self-training, or the validation given to them by their spiritual, religious, and therapeutic trajectory in front of their peers, patients, or consultants, become facilitators, leaders, healers, or, as Longman (2020) says, entrepreneurs of the feminine. This model of spiritual entrepreneurship creates charismatic-type leaderships, but also imprints a mercantile and class character on spiritual practices.

It is convenient to state that feminine spirituality has taken up and popularized an organizational form that has been key to the feminist movement: reflection circles and, in this case, of spiritual accompaniment and growth. Women’s spiritual circles are

a model of female organization that takes up various spiritual and cultural elements in order to promote self-management, empowerment, self-knowledge, and a strategic contact with the sacred that finds its expression in the body and experiences of women, thus becoming one of the privileged spaces for the development and management of feminine spirituality. (Ramírez, 2020: 91)

Although these circles have different purposes, anchors, references, and themes, there are two constants: one is that they are privileged spaces for sharing, that is, they are built as safe spaces where participants can express themselves, share, feel, be heard and contained. The second is that in this exercise of affecting and being affected in this social space, bodies and emotions play a central role in spiritual narratives and in the practices that take place there. These circles, hand in hand with the trajectories of spiritual agents and holistic healers, as well as diverse connections with practices associated with different spiritual or therapeutic anchors (native, indigenous, pagan, New Age, reinterpretations of psychological techniques and created practices or techniques) have given rise to the creation of networks and circuits of practices that have reached different levels of visibility and circulation thanks to socio-digital networks.

In Latin America, the study of the body in religious practices has been constructed mostly from the paradigm of embodiment (Csordas, 1999; Csordas and Olivas, 2021; Olivas, 2018a, 2022); and the approach to feminine spirituality has been one of the spaces that have added to its discussion. Although from the register of body and affectivity studies (Sabido, 2011) there are different dimensions applicable to the analysis of the religious (the body from institutionality, representations, interaction, etc.), it is the subjective experience, phenomenological character, and affectivity that are the essential components of embodied spirituality in a feminine key. Embodied spirituality, then, starts from assuming corporeality as a constitutive dimension of religious experience. In this sense, the body is not only the vehicle of the spirit, but the site where the sacred dwells, is created, is felt, and experienced.

But, in the case of this specific type of spirituality, we are not talking about an ethereal or disembodied body. On the contrary, the reflexivity mobilized through the somatic work (Vannini et al., 2012) of feminine spirituality and its rituals is based on the sexed, gendered, and situated experience in which women become aware of their own experiences, feelings, and discomforts, and it is from there that these experiences are reflected upon and interpreted in a spiritual key. For example, in a menstrual blood planting, a ritual of gratitude and petition that consists of pouring menstrual blood into the earth, the symbolic and gendered charge is particularly powerful. On one hand, because it implies breaking with the social and religious taboos constructed around fluids (Douglas, 1980; Ramírez, 2016), but when performed in a ritual context, blood is symbolized as gratitude for fertility, health, the cycle of life and death; while at the same time it becomes an offering that is capable of uniting a woman with the earth, with her ancestors, with other women, and with the divine that dwells in her. The body, its processes, and its fluids within the framework of feminine spirituality are the main spaces of significance and sacredness.

For these processes of embodiment, subjectivation, and somatic work, women’s circles are key. In principle because they are spaces of socialization and, in these terms, constitute sensory communities (Vannini et al., 2012); but also because it is there where these reflections and embodiments of the sacred in their own key are (re)learned. It is not surprising, in the case of women with institutional religious training, that if in their models for understanding the sacred and their bodies notions such as the impure, the unhealthy, the dangerous, the sinful persisted, they find in these other narratives that construct them as sacred, important, creative, agents, a comfortable, different and safe space to develop their spirituality and their practices through the use and resignification of their bodies and the validation of their emotions. Furthermore, this commitment to the construction of meanings also enables the circulation of a whole series of representations about women and their bodies in relation to the sacred. Examples of this are the sacred woman or the sacred body, the creative woman, the medicine woman, powerful blood, healing words, among others. In this way, we are not talking about stories and a construction of narratives alien to the body, emotion, and the subject, but about experiences of the sacred that are embodied, reflected upon, and interpreted through their material and sensory dimensions.

Keys to building situated knowledge on embodied spiritualities

Given this panorama and the concrete characteristics of this type of spirituality, it is necessary to account for some keys for the analysis and creation of situated knowledge in these spiritual spaces. The construction of these keys has mainly involved research and field experiences, but also the mobilization and recognition of the importance of some methodological strategies that do not necessarily enjoy a hegemonic place, at least from the field of religious studies.

The first key for the analysis of feminine spiritualities has been the incorporation of a gender perspective. This allows us to look at the participation of women and their concrete characteristics; that is, problematizing their sites of enunciation, the practices they develop, the inequalities they reflect and reproduce, the problems they address, but also how the spiritual and its practices from this logic ‘make’ gender. In other words, this key places women as agents of the spiritual, as the center of experiences and narratives, but without neglecting relationships with other gendered subjects and the questioning and/or reinforcement of social, religious, and gender rules that are also constructed and deconstructed on the margins of the religious. Following Fedele and Knibbe (2020: 3), this perspective allows us to see ‘the relationship between spirituality, religion and the secular through the lens of gender.’

Coupled with this perspective, is the vindication of the role and contributions of female researchers who develop their approaches by analyzing other women. Feminist epistemologies not only claim the right of women to be named as social agents, but also the role and visibility of female academics as legitimate builders of knowledge. In this sense, we speak not of epistemic privilege, but of an open critique of the strategies of validation, visibility, and recognition operating in scientific logics; while also of the necessary incorporation of other perspectives that allow enriching the analyses of religious phenomena.

The second key is methodological, and in this sense, I emphasize the importance of autoethnography (Esteban, 2004) and the sensory experience mobilized from spiritual practices also in the case of the researcher. While ethnography allows us to build knowledge from ‘being there’, the fact is that this being there not only refers to what we narrate of what we see, observe or is shared with us, but also of what we feel and what crosses us as bodily and somatic experience. Although the affective turn and its methodological proposals (Sabido, 2021) have been present in Latin America for some decades now, it is only recently that these proposals and reflections have been incorporated or made explicit as part of research exercises on a religious phenomenon. This second key not only advocates for a multi-sited and multi-platform methodology (considering that the practices and narratives of feminine spirituality also have a great presence in digital spaces), but also proposes a multisensory perspective and a vindication of the experience of the researcher as well; mainly because the field itself and its agents demand the involvement of the observer to the same degree as any other participant (Felitti and Ramírez, 2022).

Although there are different ways in which this emotional, bodily, and experiential implication can be accounted for, the fact is that it incorporates to a greater or lesser extent both an autoethnographic exercise and an identity negotiation when transforming the experience into scientific narrative. Evidence of this is an increasingly growing movement in the presence of the first person in academic writing, and the application of collaborative and co-creation methodologies that balance or seek to balance the exercises of power exerted in research contexts. This exercise of visibility and naming in the first person and collectively, mostly used by researchers whose subject of study is constructed with other women, is also part of the pending tasks that the field of religious studies itself has.

A third key has to do with the recognition of the evolution of the spiritual and religious field itself, and the ways in which we name and problematize these spaces, practices, and collectivities that were once emergent. Today, spiritualities are more than alternatives to institutional structures of belief. This interpretation, which stems from the association between religion and institution, has been questioned not only from theoretical perspectives such as the case of lived religiosity (Woodhead, 2010, 2012) but also from the study contexts themselves, as shown by Giumbelli and Toniol (2020). Those practices, beliefs, forms of organization and signification of the sacred that were named as alternatives, constitute today one more option within the plural panorama of forms of believing. And naming them not from negation (as non-institutional), but recognizing their complexities and associations with other fields beyond the religious, such as the case of health (Cornejo and Blázquez, 2014; Toniol, 2018; Viotti, 2017; Olivas, 2018b, among others), allows us to give dimension to the importance of these spiritualities within the religious field, and breadth to their empirical approaches and theoretical problematizations.

By way of closing

Feminine spirituality, from its ethnographic approach, has shown to be not only a form of spirituality within the multiple options in the current plural panorama in Latin America, but also an epistemological perspective (Ramírez, 2023). And it is from the epistemological power, the practices, narratives, meanings, and concrete characteristics of this embodied spirituality that its understanding has required the mobilization of inquiry strategies and theoretical-methodological approaches that go beyond the classic propositions of religious analysis.

Thus, throughout this article, it has been shown and reflected upon how the so-called feminine spirituality has contributed to the analysis, understanding, and expansion of the field of religious and spirituality studies. In this journey, some elements stand out. First, the theoretical-methodological frameworks. In this sense, it alludes to the need to take into account in studies on religious and spiritual phenomena perspectives, themes, and methodologies that consider gender from intersectionality; and corporeality from its materiality, its somatic modes, and emotional and affective effects. In both cases, both academic and feminist activistism, as well as specialists in body studies and affectivities have contributed greatly to the understanding of the social. However, there are still few bridges built back and forth for the approach to the spiritual and religious from these other registers.

There are also the necessary methodological reflections regarding the place we have as researchers in field contexts. Ever more often, studies of religious and spiritual practices have implied that the distance between collaborators and researchers is reduced. First, because more and more research is being carried out in communities of belonging, but also because the relationships and ways of inquiring into the senses and meanings of practices have an enormous experiential potential to be understood and not just lived by social and spiritual agents. This has brought with it a necessary reflection on the site of enunciation, and also greater collaboration in research contexts. Undoubtedly, this movement towards shared experience and its importance in the investigative exercise invites us to rethink our ways of knowing and the bodily and emotional experiences that emanate from it, but mainly implies thinking of ourselves in the field as subjects and agents always in relation. In the case of feminine and embodied spiritualities, it implies thinking and rethinking that otherness and that this construction between us and the others is a mobile and complex issue that requires situated conceptualizations. But it also implies considering that, when speaking of embodied spiritualities, neither the body nor the experiences lived from the flesh and from emotion are alien in a research context. Unequivocally, the field of study of religions and spiritualities has already begun a work of articulation and constant theoretical-methodological dialogue with other fields of knowledge; however, it is still a work in the process of consolidation.