Representations of Women and Femininity among Women Spiritual Practices Participants in Russia
The authors study the representations of women and femininity of Russians participating in «women practices». In the Russian public space, the phrase «women practices» is sustainable and recognizable, is actively used by its participants concerning their activities, while in scholarship, it denotes a specific type of gender practice. The popularity of such practices grows, but the practices themselves rarely become the focus of scientific research, and the Russian academic study of religion does not provide a unified definition of either women’s practices or spirituality. These rather new phenomena require new methods and scholars’ perspective. In-depth interviews were carried out to solve the tasks. The authors came to the following results. 1) psychologization of spirituality, involving the use of the language of psychology to describe the practices themselves, goals, outcomes, the conditionality of the root causes of accessing women spiritual practices in complicated life situations and psychological conditions; 2) the transformation of ideas about women and femininity under the influence of the experience of participation in women›s practices; 3) the dominance of the secular gender component of practices; 4) the syncretism of the language for describing women practices, which incorporates the discourses of religion and psychology.