Vodun’s ritual worlds elevate women while social structures constrain them. Examining mambos’ authority through class, lineage, and race reveals a complex negotiation between empowerment and hierarchy. A critique-centered lens exposes both the transformative possibilities and persistent limits of gendered power in Vodun.
Between Lwa and Lineage: Intersectionality in Vodun Leadership
A critique-centered synthesis integrates these empirical threads to produce a nuanced account of Vodun leadership. The ritual prominence of women—observable in the centrality of mambos, the prominence of female lwa, and the historical role of figures associated with resistance—must be read alongside the structural determinants that shape leadership trajectories. Intersectionality provides the analytic frame: gender is not a singular axis but operates in concert with lineage, class, and race to enable or constrain women’s authority (Raitano, 2013; Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020).
This perspective cautions against two errors. First, romanticization: portraying Vodun solely as a domain of female emancipation obscures the material and social dependencies that limit priestesses’ autonomy. As the dissertation on Vodou art and history shows, ritual authority has always been entangled with social hierarchies and political stakes (University of Maryland, 2005). Second, reductive skepticism: emphasizing patriarchal persistence alone risks erasing the real, often disruptive, ways that women rework power—whether through public rites, economic networks, or queer-inflected spiritual identities (AnthroSource, 2021; Lithub, 2021).
Practically, an intersectional critique suggests several empirical priorities. Ethnographers should trace trajectories of individual priestesses across life courses to show how lineage and class affect leadership durability (Raitano, 2013). Comparative work between rural Haitian lakou and urban diasporic terreiros can illuminate how racialized transnational capital reconfigures authority (Nova Religio, 2023). Finally, attention to performance genres—Rara, mourning rites, and possessive ceremonies—reveals how gendered power is negotiated in embodied practice rather than settled doctrine (AnthroSource, 2021; JSTOR, 2015).
Theoretically, this synthesis argues for a middle path: treat Vodun as a field of contingent possibilities where women exercise meaningful agency within constraints that are themselves historically constituted. Such a posture honors practitioners’ claims about spiritual authority while subjecting those claims to rigorous, intersectional scrutiny—a move that counters both exoticization and erasure (Harvard Pluralism Project, 2020). By centering the critique, scholars and engaged readers can appreciate Vodun’s transformative capacities without neglecting the social fabrics that limit or channel those capacities.
