Public Masculinities at the Feast

This chapter takes readers on processions through Williamsburg, focusing on a trio of ritual spaces in feast geography: the Questua, the Line of the March, and the parish’s shrine. It explores the hierarchy of masculinities within this Catholic community and how those are performed in how men navigate neighborhood space. Manhood, masculinity, and male authority are contingent on props, stuff, clothing, and setting but are also institutionally granted and achieved in the eyes of other men. Men aspire to and achieve manhood through lifelong involvement with the feast. This chapter examines how life stage matters to ideals of manhood and masculinity and how fatherhood represents the promise of new generations dedicated to the feast and parish. It argues that heterosexuality is central to the community’s vision of a thriving feast and examines the marginalization and excision of gay men from that vision.

Manual Labor and the Artistry of Devotion in the Basement

This chapter explores masculinity and material culture in the backstage space of the church basement, where devotional and ritual objects are under construction. It argues that manual labor is devotional labor and examines the relationship between masculinity, embodiment, and religious transmission. In the basement men learn to embody masculine values and skills, like craft, creativity, and dedication. Through painting saints and building the giglio men enact their devotion and commitment to the parish and achieve belonging and status in the feast community. In this homosocial space, men demonstrate proficiency in Catholic iconography and negotiate questions of materiality and sacred presence as they repair the broken bodies of saints. This chapter explores the relationship between homosociality, Catholic practice, joking, and camaraderie among lay men. As embodied ethnography, this chapter centers reflexivity by examining the positionality of the female ethnographer in the male space and gender in fieldwork.

Introduction

Each year the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel celebrates its annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. The crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, a devotional spectacle of strong male bodies lifting the giglio, a four-ton, seventy-foot tower through the streets. This ethnographic study delves into this masculine world of devotion and the religious lives of lay Catholic men. As an embodied ethnography it reflects on the gendered and bodily processes of fieldwork. It argues that the stakes of devotion are high amid neighborhood change and gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This intergenerational community of Italian American men understands devotion as the very work of keeping the parish alive. It argues that churches are vital sites for the making of masculinity and that religious communities offer enduring and appealing models of manhood to contemporary men.

Making Money, Keeping the Parish Alive

This chapter is about how fundraising is a devotional practice. Dollars and cents are not secondary to Catholic devotion but are intertwined with intergenerational bonds between men, loyalties to the church, and ideas about survival and community longevity. Counting, collecting, and soliciting money is religious work. Discourses of life and death sacralize money and valorize men’s labor as productive and vital. Keeping the parish alive then becomes a masculine duty. This chapter takes readers backstage in the money room at the feast and through embodied ethnography explores how parishioners are trained in money work. Following the labor of one man, it explores how money work is a calling and how it binds feast organizers to the parish and implicates them in the labor of sustaining the church. This chapter unpacks men’s organizational labor and constructions of “productivity” and “dedication” to consider how they embody masculinities through working for the church.

Turks, Tattoos, and the Masculine Body of the Feast

In Brooklyn, Italian American men enact their devotion to Saint Paulinus, also known as San Paolino, the patron saint of Nola, Italy, with their bodies. This chapter explores how men come to be a part of a devotional community through material culture: costumes, objects, tattoos. It argues that devotion is as much about bodily fluency as it is about belief. It explores how men labor in service of the saint’s feast, and how their tattoos materialize their love of the saints and each other. By playing Turk in the Dance of the Giglio and hagiographical drama of Paulinus’s life, men enact and embody their devotion and play with masculine aesthetics. The chapter also considers gender and the embodiment of devotion in men’s travel to Nola and the pedagogical and gendered processes through which boys come to be Catholic men in the community.

Constructing Catholic Propriety on North Eighth Street

This chapter examines how Italian Americans negotiate a diversifying Church and urban landscape and contend with sharing their saint with Haitian and Haitian American devotees of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. While the feast is a site where Catholics of different races and ethnicities share devotional space, it is also a site of intra-Catholic boundary making. Devotional celebrations are sites of religious evaluation, racializing, and territoriality, where onlookers judge who is and who is not acting as a “good Catholic” and whose devotional affinities verge on “superstition.” Public performances of devotion are where people judge, construct, and enact Catholic propriety. Through everyday talk and boundary-making practices, Italian American Catholics construct ideas of “good” American Catholic practice and label the practices of ethnic and racial others as admirable yet foreign and excessive, echoing the very same discourses that placed their ancestors outside the bounds of “good” Catholic practice.

Epilogue

The epilogue catalogues what has changed at the feast and at the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel since the completion of the research. It demonstrates how ethnography probes the ephemeral. Moreover, it explores how the church is entering a new era of publicity and financial stability but examines the way people feel uncomfortable about issues of money and a seemingly new spirit of acquisitiveness, their critiques highlighting the ways there are “appropriate” and “inappropriate” ways to make money at the feast. It presents the outcomes of the devotional labor and work of the men featured in the book, confirming the assertion that gendered work, devotion, and status are inseparable at OLMC. It concludes by arguing that the feast and parish offer young men the promise of a route to manhood. The feast promises meaningful labor and the possibility of being a self-made man, albeit a church-made version.

Religion and Gentrification in the Twenty-First-Century City

This chapter explores how Williamsburg, Brooklyn, captures, in miniature, broader twentieth- and twenty-first-century trends of deindustrialization, urban renewal and the decline of the white ethnic enclave, gentrification and the revitalization of cities, and neoliberal politics. It places architecture, development, and gentrification at the center of threats to the longevity of religious communities like the Catholic parish. It argues for the importance of religion and religious institutions in understanding how communities resist and adapt to gentrification. It theorizes “lifeblood of the parish” and explores the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s ethic of survival amid decades of neighborhood change, under Robert Moses and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The feast and giglio are an assertion of a particular masculine history of Williamsburg, and this chapter examines the gendered logics by which communities work to secure and narrate their survival in a city increasingly built for leisure, tourism, and the creative class.