“Gender, power, and religious transnationalism among the African diaspora in Canada” in African Geographical Review

Stimulated by a wide range of factors, the sons and daughters of Africa have relocated to Canada in significant numbers in recent years, and have, in turn, prompted research and public discussions about the extent to which they are incorporated in the host society. While the racism-laced economic challenges faced by these African immigrants have featured prominently in the burgeoning Canadian literature on immigrants, only a handful of scholars have examined how Africans in Canada use their cultural and religious practices to facilitate their settlement and integration processes, and fewer still have explored how gender roles are enacted and justified within the African diasporic church. With empirical data from Ghanaian churches in Toronto, this article examines the degree to which African immigrant churches are gendered, paying particular attention to how male-female differentials in power and transnational positionality play out in these churches. Our findings indicate that while women are very active in the immigrant church, they wield lesser power than men when it comes to leadership positions. At the same time, there appears to be some power convergence between Ghanaian men and women in Toronto, in general, and this convergence is steadily permeating the Ghanaian immigrant church.

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