When Women Reject Women’s Ordination: Reframing and Semanticizing in the Speeches of Two Female Seventh-day Adventists

Abstract

This study analyzes two public speeches of two North-American Seventh-day Adventist women who oppose women’s ordination, in order to understand how they reconcile inequity perpetuated by their religious position that denigrates women. The two women in this study address the apparent disadvantage by reframing the issue and reordering their reality. Whereas one speaker creates other formidable sub-issues that make exclusion of women from church leadership imperative, the other speaker resorts to the elusive notion of female privilege. I demonstrate how their discourse surrounding ministry and headship illuminates the fact that gender relations and religious convictions are ordered through permeable boundaries of arbitrary lexico-semantics.