Resisting the Catholic Church’s notion of the nun as self-sacrificing woman

Abstract

Should we view nuns as oppressed or agentic? A woman’s identity is constructed on multiple sites, but the identity of the nun is primarily constructed by the patriarchal institution of the Catholic Church, which ascribes meaning to and regulates her life. This article examines the Catholic Church’s dominant discursive construction of the nun as self-sacrificing woman. It draws on a study that applied feminist and Foucauldian analysis, first, to key Church texts relating to nuns’lives and, second, to interview data of 43 Australian/New Zealand nuns, exploring ways in which nuns in this sample negotiate the Church’s dominant discursive constructions of the nun in their lived experience as nuns. Subject to male institutional authority, nuns are represented by the Church as living lives of self-sacrifice, devoting themselves wholeheartedly and single-mindedly to God and to the Church’s work. Nuns in this study’s sample actively resist such representations, exercising personal agency in making decisions about their own lives, and in living alone rather than communally. In doing so, they represent themselves as agentic rather than oppressed women.