Genusinkarnationer i kyrkans rum. En könad o-ordning

Abstract

The Church of Sweden has undergone many changes concerningthe role of women duringthe last fifty years. This artide tries to investigate whether or not these changes really promotes gender equality in the church. Circumstances that on a surface level seems to be a step forward, like more women priests, can on a more hidden level point in another direction, a general weakening of the role of priests both in the society as a whole and in the church. In order to make the Church of Sweden more transparent I analyse it as if made up of (at least) three different rooms; a physical room (the church building where services are held), and two nonphysical rooms (the organisation that organises people and activities, and a divine room understood as the faith and teaching of the church). Gender understood both as a socially and culturally construal of what it is to be a woman or a man, here called "gender (without a body)", and as the individual expression of what it is to be a woman oraman, here called "gender with a body", is used to analyse the rooms. The three rooms obviously affect each other, but it is also clear that a change for the better from a feminist perspective in one of the rooms does not necessarily lead to a change in another room. So far feminist theologians in Sweden have paid much attention to what has been going on in the physical room. The article ends by stressing the importance of attention also for what goes on in the two non-physical rooms. That means a call for feminist politics in the organisation and a feminist theological re-construction of the "divine room".