Carolyn Brewer, BA (Canterbury), BA Hons first class (Murdoch), PhD (Murdoch)

Email: carolyn.brewer@anu.edu.au

Biographical Statement

Carolyn Brewer trained as a primary school teacher at Canterbury Teachers’ College in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She was posted to Ashburton, a small town in mid-Canterbury, where she eventually married, had two daughters and from where she escaped in 1989. As a mature-aged student she studied Feminist Studies and Religious Studies at Canterbury University, before going to Murdoch University in Perth to focus her honours year on the debates surrounding the ordination of women into the Anglican Church in Australia. She accepted a Murdoch doctoral scholarship to further explore the impact of Christianity on women’s lives – this time Catholicism in the Philippines.

Current Research

Carolyn’s research interests continue to focus on issues relating to gender and religion in the Philippines. Her most recent research project seeks to explore the history of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Philippines from her introduction by the Spanish in the sixteenth-century to the present day phenomenon of devotion to Our Mother of Perpetual Help at Baclaran. The project will analyse changes in gender relations across time, brought about by veneration to the Virgin. It will also provide a history of a potent religious ideology with the paradoxical capacity to serve radically opposed ends: the entrenchment of social and gender inequality and repression of human rights by governments, on the one hand; and popular empowerment and emancipation on the other.

Key Publications

• Holy Confrontation: Religion, Gender and Sexuality in the Philippines, 1521–1685, Manila: Institute of Women’s Studies, 2001.
• Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521–1685, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004
• (ed. with Anne-Marie Medcalf) Researching the Fragments: Histories of Women in the Asian Context, Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2000.