Laurie Denyer Willis (University of Edinburgh) "Wife-Work in an Evangelical Rio: Pleasure, Protection and the Minimally Safe Bedroom"
| Dates: | 7 December 2026 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Laurie Denyer Willis |
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This talk begins from an unlikely scene: a sex costume party hosted by an evangelical pastor in a woman’s home in Rio de Janeiro, where lingerie is prayed over as a tool of marital protection. Drawing on ethnographic research in Rio’s subúrbios, women’s evangelical networks and digital spaces, I examine how conservative evangelical projects teach women to cultivate pleasure and desire within their marriages. I place these pedagogies of pleasure within a broader project I call ‘wife-work’, or the intimate labour through which women learn to sustain marriage, and make patriarchal relations desirable and worth defending. In a context of chronic urban insecurity and the tightening entanglement of evangelical and far-right politics, sexual pleasure becomes one technique through which the heterosexual family is imagined as a space of protection. I develop the idea of the “minimally safe bedroom” to describe how structural insecurity is translated into intimate responsibility. Wife-work relocates the work of making life safe onto women’s bodies and relationships, while offering small but consequential experiences of pleasure and security in return.
Laurie Denyer Willis is Senior Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology.
Speaker
Laurie Denyer Willis
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Travel and Contact Information
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Boardroom, 2nd floor
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
