Mary

The locus to speak of the feminine

Abstract

The way in which a culture understands itself and its relationship with the sacred shapes not only religious life, but also a way of being in the world. The same can be said in the opposite direction: the religious sphere can be captured in some anthropomorphism to justify a position that excludes. Taking this premise into account, we can look at the position of women in the early church, the roles they played, and how and why the relevance of their performance was minimized through misogyny that occurs in different contexts of Christianity as a historical construction. By misogyny we understand a posture that engenders forms of discourse and practice that transform women into objects. Anchored in religious discourse in order to legitimize male hegemony, misogyny established a stereotype justifying female inferiority and submission. By understanding woman in the role Mary had as a woman and mother in the history and discourse of salvation, specifically in the incarnation, we can propose a positive perspective that goes beyond history and corrects some of the distortions of historicism with regard to the role of women.