Weeping as the Addolorata : Popular devotion at the margins of Europe

This article is about female devotees of the Addolorata (Our Lady of Sorrows) and the tears shed on Good Friday on the streets of the Old Town of Palermo, Sicily. Recently criticized by some Church authorities as overly sentimental and inauthentic, such weeping has become a site of tension in efforts to modernize or contain this popular ritual. These critiques echo historical attempts to regulate female embodied ‘excesses’ and reflect Orientalizing discourses that frame Southern Italian religiosity as backward, in light of Palermo’s liberal rebranding as a post-mafia, cosmopolitan city. Yet women’s tears resist full domestication, flowing between female devotees, allowing them to embody the divine and to forge alternative modes of relatedness that transcend male confraternal forms and the nuclear family. Through ethnographic attention to the effects of tears, this article examines the potentiality of these bodily fluids, as well as the gendered and class-based exclusions of liberal cosmopolitanism in a place that has been cast as insufficiently European.