Representações de gênero em casais e documentos da Igreja Adventista do Sétimo Dia

Abstract

Several scholars have demonstrated that the ability to relate is an important component of gender relationships in marriage and this seems to be even more relevant in the evangelical discourse, possibly because they claim to be keepers of the Edenic deposit of gender equality. The presuppositions of this work are connected to the categories relationship/sexuality, aiming at finding a key for the understanding the relationships between husband and wife in contemporaneity. In this research, performed with 12 seventh-day Adventists couples, in Cachoeira-BA, the author seeks to perceive the ways in which these couples represent the conjugal relationships examined in their sayings in writings of this church, organized in the form of periodicals, books and different handbooks. The investigative interview and the documentary examination employed aimed at a contextualized reflection and shaped in a process of reconstruction of the reality investigated. The finds in documents and regular sayings of the interviews were crossed with the ideas of several scholars, in the exhaustive assemblage of an analysis grid per category of study. The result reveals, among other findings, that the domestic unity in the SDA Church is a place of different semantic connotations, in which the inequality operates moderately and sometimes strongly, making feminine submission a founder of negative qualities and that the new paternity reached ASD homes, even though it is immersed in an individualism proper of the ideological transformations of society. The sanctification of the Sabbath day, among Adventists, receives singular overtones because of its implications to the vision of the holiness of sex and divinization of relationships. Many couples feel more inspired on Sabbath to solve their differences, reinforce their relationships and sexuality. The topic is of considerable importance for the production about family in Brazil.