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“Thunder” and “Sweetness”: Authority and Gender in Pentecostal Performance

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Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism
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Abstract

This chapter examines the heart of Pentecostal pastoral authority—preaching performance. Woodworth-Etter and McPherson’s worship spaces and personal appearances gave skeptics and followers alike impressive signals of womanliness and ministerial authority, but the bodily acts1 performed within them in the form of revivalist preaching were what made them sacred vessels of the ministers’ messages. These “spatial practices—the ‘techniques of the body’, the formalized ‘gestures of approach’, and the location and direction of embodied movement—all contribute[d] towards producing the distinctive quality of sacred space,” in Woodworth-Etter and McPherson’s revivalist meeting places.2

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Notes

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© 2015 Leah Payne

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Payne, L. (2015). “Thunder” and “Sweetness”: Authority and Gender in Pentecostal Performance. In: Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494672_6

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