“Sister Spirit”: A Case Study on Feminist Religious Organizing

Abstract

Utilizing NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice as a case study, this paper explores how women religious and staff at NETWORK communicatively frame organizational tensions experienced with the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Claiming religious organizing can be considered a type of feminist organizing and exploring tensions of form within organizing, this project relies on interview and participant-observation data to showcase how NETWORK constitutes a socio-material feminist third space, named Sister Spirit, in response to tensional dualities. This study demonstrates how one organization manages dualities via trialectic response to organizational tension.

Keywords:

• Alternative Organizing
• Feminism
• Religion
• Tension
• Third Space

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Patrice M. Buzzanell for her gracious support in critiquing and editing this work.

Disclosure Statement

I have a potential conflict of interest to report. Since completing this project, I now make a monetary donation on a monthly basis to support NETWORK’s efforts.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

I received funding from a 2017-2018 PRF Research Grant from the Purdue Research Foundation, in addition to a PROMISE Award from the Purdue College of Liberal Arts to support this research project.