Abstract
My contribution concerns British spiritualism around fin de siècle, and I present this topic as an illustration of how a new religious cosmopraxis might unlock new identities, specifically new gender roles. Since most trance mediums were young women, spiritualism has become a significant topic of feminist anthropology.
The analyses show how the role of the medium provided an empowering alternative in the Victorian gender doctrine of separate spheres and allowed women, relegated to private domestic spheres, to take on an active and influential public role. This is in line with the general politics of spiritualism, which was associated from its very beginnings with emancipatory movements.
However, it also constitutes a paradox of identity, dubbed by Jeremy C. Young as "empowering passivity." Since it is in a trance when the identity and agency of the medium are completely suppressed, the body becomes just a mouthpiece for the spirit entity.
The paradox resides in the fact that it is precisely deliberate suppression of one's agency that leads to social empowerment. It is this paradox of identity that is at the crux of my contribution, and I frame it in Victor Turner's concepts of antistructure and liminality.
On the one hand, the spiritualist Beyond, an egalitarian world of enlightened spirit entities, can be interpreted as an antistructure to the Victorian hierarchy and thus explicates how "ghosts provided an escape of liberation" from the patriarchal structures. On the other hand, the concept of liminality sheds light on the paradox of the medium.
If viewed as a liminal role between the social ideal of passivity and the progressive ideal of emancipation, it could be empowering not despite passivity but because of it. In this perspective, mediums would reach empowerment not by sketching a radically new identity but by crafting a new identity out of a reclaimed and subverted existing patriarchal norm.