Hybrid femininity as a practice of Catholic women’s resistance

This article examines how Catholic women in Poland negotiate and contest gender inequalities within the Roman Catholic Church through what I conceptualise as hybrid femininity. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews conducted in 2019–2020 with highly educated, professionally active laywomen involved in Catholic communities in large urban centres, the study explores everyday practices of agency within a highly hierarchical and masculinised religious institution. The analysis shows that although participants accept key elements of Church doctrine, including sacramental authority reserved for men, they simultaneously challenge gendered hierarchies embedded in everyday Church practices. Rather than openly contesting doctrine or withdrawing from the institution, women distinguish between sacred authority and extra-sacral forms of clerical power, which they perceive as negotiable. Their resistance takes subtle, relational and context-sensitive forms, including discursive reinterpretations of femininity, negotiations in everyday interactions with clergy and strategic efforts to organise relative autonomy within Church structures. The concept of hybrid femininity captures how women combine religiously valued attributes with meanings associated with secular egalitarianism. This hybridity enables them to navigate tensions between patriarchal religious structures and contemporary gender expectations without breaking institutional belonging. Rather than positioning the secular and the religious as oppositional domains, the findings show how women selectively mobilise resources from both spheres in ways they perceive as morally legitimate and compatible with Catholic identity. By focusing on incremental and embedded forms of resistance, the article contributes to feminist scholarship on gender and religion by challenging binary distinctions between compliance and rebellion. It argues that women’s everyday negotiations constitute gradual micro-transformations that reshape symbolic representations of femininity and everyday power relations within the Catholic Church, even in the absence of formal institutional change.