Power and Performance Among African American Holiness-Pentecostal Women

Team Members/Contributors

Judith S. Casselberry Yale University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Based on twenty months of intensive participant observation in a Queens, New York Holiness-Pentecostal church, this study explores the ways African American Holiness-Pentecostal women employ liturgical and musical performance strategies in establishing power and authority both inside of church and outside in wider civil society. Music dominates Pentecostal liturgy thus making performance strategies a critical site for analysis of the gendered distinctions in adherents’ conceptions of legitimate power and authority. This dissertation will also address the ways in which the aesthetics of performance strategies specific to black American Pentecostalism and the dynamic production of liturgical and musical performances are key sites for examining the intersectionality of religion, gender, race, and class played out through identity construction.

Through analysis of women congregants’ production and mediation of porous boundaries between sacred and secular discourses and practices, this dissertation will explore how, when, and in what ways African American Holiness-Pentecostal women extend, contest, or reinterpret liturgical and musical performance strategies in establishing power and authority both inside and outside of church settings. In so doing, this project illuminates the ways in which black American Pentecostal women both practice and live their faith.