UC San Diego

My dissertation’s story begins in 1976, when the General Convention of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. (ECUSA) voted to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood, which had previously been closed to women. In the years since, both women and men have been ordained to the priesthood in ECUSA and empowered to hold the sacred authority to consecrate sacraments. This drastic shift in the practices of sacramental ministry is a meaningful change to the material and immaterial dimensions of religious practice, and gender as a lived reality for ECUSA adherents. In this study, I examine the reverberations of the changes associated with women’s ordination, drawing on interviews with ECUSA clergy and laity to examine how these respondents are still wrestling with questions of meaning and practice. I offer a theoretical formulation of gender not as one social structure, but rather as a multiplicity of social structures bound together by their common origin in the social organization of reproduction. Each instance of gender as a social structure, including sacramental ministry, is open to change, following the process I show unfolding in ECUSA: changing practices, discarding old schemas, making meaning by importing meaning from other instance of gender as social structure, and building new schemas which oppose one another therefore constructing two new instances of social structure where previously there had been one. My primary theoretical contribution in this dissertation is to propose a new model, The Hydra Model, which illustrates this process of social change to gender, and which I argue can be applied to other instances of change to gender as social structure. Empirically, I contribute a case study of how such changes unfold, showing what happens to the meaning of sacraments, to the immaterial dimension of sacred authority, when the gender of sacramental ministers broadens to include women as well as men. Understanding how meanings change in structures as apparently eternal as gender and religion equips social analysts to contend with the reverberations of changes like the approval of women’s ordination, and to anticipate how such changes to practice might be visible in meanings and deeply-held beliefs.