In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, gender is experienced as a process of gradual transformation in a person's physical and emotional being. Bodies matter, and are made to matter through the repetitions and reiterations which performatively effect gendered personhood (Butler 1993: 9). For Pogoro Catholics, bodies are given meaning at the level of experience through a twofold process of incorporation. Symbolic constructions of gender are embodied and incorporated into male and female persons through rituals that establish and consolidate gendered identities by the manipulation of both physical substances and cosmological powers capable of affecting the body. Participation in such rituals is not merely experienced in the symbolic terms of representations, but as progressively emotionally affecting those who participate. Representations of gender are not confined to the abstract level of symbolic discourse, but are enacted and experienced through specific ritual roles of gendered interdependencies (cf. Kratz 1994). These roles centre on a division of labour between men and certain categories of women who assume responsibility for dealing with the potentially dangerous powers generated through fertility and death.

I argue that women's experience of loving and caring for others, and of managing death and sorrow, underlies a distinctly female religiosity premised on the remembrance of the crucified Christ through compassion for his bereaved mother, Mary.