Witches, pagans, and priestesses: women-centered spiritualities in the Spanish context
This dissertation arises from a central question: how do women-centered spiritualities in the Spanish context relate to current societal debates challenging gender binaries and cultural appropriation? My aim is to approach the complexity of the Spanish religious landscape and specifically the case of what I refer to as women-centered spiritualities. This phenomenon, though not widely studied in Spain, can greatly contribute to academic debates around gender, and cultural appropriation in contemporary spiritualities.
Based on four years of fieldwork, this research reveals the following findings: First, that women-centered spiritualities could emerge in Spain thanks to the country’s secularization processes. Second, that they exhibit what I call ‘gender eclecticism’, a phenomenon consisting of different ideas, practices, and theories about gender—and sex—coexisting in an apparent same paradigm, giving rise to a paradoxical but, at the same time, logical discourse. Third, that their practitioners simultaneously reject (cishetero)patriarchal gender roles and do not question the existence of people whose identities may be framed beyond the gender binary, while maintaining binary and polar gender structures in their worldview linked to a pair of deities/archetypes with a clear gender mark. Fourth, that they navigate cultural appropriation concerns through moral frameworks that distinguish between legitimate cultural borrowings and illegitimate appropriations. Finally, that they justify their cross-cultural spiritual borrowing through the conceptual frameworks of ‘culture as something universal’, ‘culture as something social’, and ‘culture as something in constant change’.