This essay is the fourth in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage and the first in a series about gender and Quakerism. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.
In my first three Quaker Fellows responses, I unpacked some of my initial responses and broad experiences of the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage to Peru and Bolivia. While there is certainly much more to talk about (and I reserve the right to come back to the topic in future reflections) I am going to take advantage of recent events in the Quaker Fellows group and spend a few posts transitioning from the Pilgrimage to my more recent experiences in Quaker Fellows at Earlham College, while simultaneously addressing a topic which appeared to hang uncomfortably over both groups like a pre-Halloween ghost: Gender.
In this response, I will (once again) lay out what I perceived during the Pilgrimage, this time going into a bit more detail about the ways in which gender affected our experience. In my next response, I will explain and address my understanding and opinion of the controversy which has been taking place among Quaker Fellows in the past weeks.
I’ll begin by stating the obvious: Gender has been involved in just about everything in just about every place in just about every time in which civilization (and even, you could argue, sexually-reproducing organisms) has yet existed. Much like race and sexual orientation, every single person has one, and at the same time no two people express their identities in precisely the same way. As such, it has tremendous implications on the way we organize ourselves and perceive the world.
Taken a step further, religion (as a way of organizing ourselves and perceiving the world) and gender are almost inextricably intertwined, and that becomes increasingly apparent in Judeo-Christian religious groups whose practices and principles date back to before third-, second-, and even first-wave feminism. Religious groups like the Friends Church and its Bolivian and Peruvian counterparts are certainly no exception.
As I mentioned in my first blog post, one of the hardest challenges I faced during the Pilgrimage was my attempt to understand and reconcile with the gender-associated concepts of the most conservative of the Friends Churches in South America, in particular the Holiness Church. Their literal interpretations of (and, in some cases, beyond literal, as I could not always see how their practices could be directly derived from) Scripture led them to believe that because Eve was created from Adam and had committed original sin, all women existed to serve men. I was shocked to discover that in some churches men and women sat on different sides of the room, and horrified to learn that in at least one women were not even given chairs to sit on.
Gender, however, reached far beyond the practices of one of the church we visited. Indeed, in many ways it set the dynamics, and was a major tension, of the Pilgrimage itself. Not only were the boys and girls separated into separate rooms, but in some cases they were treated differently for it. At one church, the girls were given extra blankets; the boys were not. At one point while we were unloading from a bus, the leaders specifically called for men to carry all of our backpacks and supplies. Gender affected the way we were treated and how we experienced the Pilgrimage from our relationships with one another (both good and bad) to subtle microagressions to outright discrimination.
The fact of the matter is that the Pilgrimage was very romantically-fraught and sexually-tense. I don’t need to go into too many details, but suffice it to say that many gifts were bought and by the end, quite a few tears were shed. Almost every night in the mens’ sleeping quarters, one or two of the South Americans would ask me how to say things like “Do you have a girlfriend?” and repeat to himself, “Do… You… Ave… A… Glow… Friend?” By the end one of them could say “You have beautiful eyes like the ocean.”
Near the end of the Pilgrimage, I made a tally of all of the people who had a romantic or sexual connection with at least one other Pilgrim: 16, or 50%. Afterwards, I learned that that number was actually higher. There’s no value judgment here – I’m simply pointing out the profound impact these kinds of relationships had on the Pilgrimage. In fact, many would argue that this is perfectly normal behavior for a group of 16-to-19-year-olds spending over a month of constant, intimate time together. One of the Quaker Fellows at Earlham who went on the Pilgrimage before mine reported a similar story for hers, though I’m sure the entire dynamic of the Pilgrimage was radically different due to its location in Europe.
All of this is to say that like it or not, gender was inseparably intertwined with (and continues to permeate) the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, our relationships to one another, personal faith, the separations of religious organizations, our identities, and pretty much every aspect of our society in one way or ten (usually ten). As such, it should considered critically important in just about every discussion affecting such controversial issues as religion, identity, and conflict.
The Troubled Sky Reveals 