Finding Faith and Feminism in ‘The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns’

Nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. In medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

I have written before about my admiration for nuns. Although rarely present in popular culture as anything more complex than tight-lipped disciplinarians (or, at best, all-singing all-dancing disciplinarians), nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. After all, in medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.

The-Sisterhood

So I was excited to watch Lifetime’s new series, The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns. The show, which aired all of its six episodes within the past month, follows five young women who are in the discernment process of trying to figure out whether they are called to become women religious. If that sounds many more steps away from actually becoming nuns than the show title suggests, that’s because it is. The complexities of Church procedure do not, perhaps, translate too easily to reality TV soundbites. Indeed, at least one sister has criticized the show’s oversimplifications, complaining that:

The Sisterhood is a ‘reality’ series that really isn’t. While perhaps not scripted, the scenarios are deliberately constructed, the crises are set up in Survivor mode as if a competition is in play, and someone will ‘go home’!”

To which one is tempted to respond, well, yes. It’s a reality show. Of course it has all the characteristics of reality television: a focus on manufacturing drama and sensationalizing wherever possible, the artificial shoehorning of events and interactions into satisfying narrative arcs, avoidance of the really deep interrogations. If you’re not on board with those terms, or at least capable of engaging them with a suitably genre-savvy skepticism, then perhaps reality TV isn’t for you.

Sisters like selfies too! They're just like us!
Sisters like selfies too! They’re just like us!

But once all of the usual disclaimers have been made, there’s really quite a lot of interesting stuff going on here, even for those of us who might not go quite so far as to call the show “surprisingly insightful.” First and foremost, we are being presented with a perspective rarely seen in pop culture, that of young women who (might) want to become women religious. Young women – a demographic so often trivialized at best, demonized at worst – are being taken seriously in their existential quest, whether that quest involves an unnameably deep yearning for the absolute or a panic attack over acne. We are shown women’s communities, women’s interactions, women’s relationships with God. By definition, there are almost no men at all in the whole show: Eseni’s boyfriend shows up a couple of time, and Claire spends a whole evening witnessing to / flirting with a guy at a bar, but that’s about it.

Oh, apart from Jesus. There is SO MUCH Jesus. Catholic Vote slots the show neatly into a proud lineage of “emotional, expressive young women dealing with the notion of becoming a Bride of Christ,” drawing parallels between the young women of The Sisterhood and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The “Jesus is my boyfriend” trope is so interesting because of its indeterminacy: is this the hegemony of compulsory heterosexuality over even those who explicitly reject its demands, or is it a queering of the faith and a way for women to take control of their sexuality within a patriarchal institution?

This question does not get explored in any depth, and it’s not the only issue I wish had been examined. For example, when judgmental white girl Claire objects to African American Eseni’s twerking, it’s clearly a racialized interaction, but that doesn’t get addressed. Similarly, when Eseni expresses trepidation about going to the south, the race angle is never mentioned. The experiences of Black women in Catholicism in the US could be whole show on its own, and since pop culture usually only ever shows Black Christians as being part of Black church, I would have loved an honest look at the role of race in Eseni’s experiences as a Catholic.

Claire is probably trying real hard not to judge Eseni right now, but being judgmental is like 75% of her personality.
Claire is probably trying real hard not to judge Eseni right now, but being judgmental is like 75 percent of her personality.

Additionally, a feminist take on the convent is never really explored. One sister talks about finding fulfillment of nurturing instincts in ways different from traditional family expectations, but she has to make it icky by tying the nurturing instincts to the nuns’ being female. The girls discuss their understanding of chastity a little, but it all does still seem very rooted in a culture of shame.

To my surprise, I found myself in tears over the culmination of one woman’s story. As the only daughter, Christie is acutely aware of how she is thwarting her parents’ expectations by entering religious life, and this was painfully relatable for me. Who knew that becoming a nun and coming out as a trans guy had such resonances? And yet it makes a certain amount of sense, considering the number of narratives we have of female saints living their lives as men. The construction of the nun as a woman who is voluntarily surrendering her sexuality and reproduction (and the idea that this makes her a man) opens up a whole vein of feminist analysis which isn’t brought into the show at all. Feminist analysis and profound explorations of faith are not part of The Sisterhood, but they are almost irresistible responses to it.

Christie just has a lot of emotions about Jesus, okay?
Christie just has a lot of emotions about Jesus, OK?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. As an Anglo-Catholic who also has emotions about Jesus, he snarks from a place of love.

“The Demon” in ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’

‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,’ a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

Oranges-Are-Not-the-Only-Cover

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of The Terror of Little Girls Theme Week.

I used to not understand why so many queer people disliked coming out stories in films, literature, and TV, but now I do. Because, as important as coming out stories are to the community, they are not the only stories–not even along with their flip-side: queer-bashing stories–the community has to tell, a fact casual observers wouldn’t realize watching most queer characters in movies and on television. The omission isn’t because real-life queer people haven’t led interesting lives, but because screenwriters, when adapting real-life queer people’s stories, have cut the queer right out of the script. This phenomenon is not a relic of the distant past: last year’s film about the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, had no mention of her long-term relationship with a woman. This year’s much anticipated bio-pic about WWII codebreaker Alan Turing who was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of  “homosexuality” and was then forced to undergo “chemical castration” as punishment–and went on to kill himself as a result–includes little enough of his identity as a gay man that even straight critics have noticed.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

The TV film, directed by Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), and scored by Rachel Portman (who has composed for many films, Belle  is one of the most recent), captures a world of women. Jess’s mother is one of several middle-aged and older “ladies” in unfashionable 1950s-style suits and hats (the action starts around 1968) who are the backbone of the church. The pastor is the only man of note in nearly three hours of run-time: Jess’s father is present throughout her childhood, but he’s either sleeping (he works the night shift) or looking on with raised eyebrows but no other comment while Jess’s mother embarks on her latest project (equipping the house with an indoor toilet, painting all the house interiors, traveling to another town to minister to the sick or gathering Jess’s books to burn them). The father is so hesitant to speak that in a scene toward the end several of the characters are startled to hear him say a quiet “Amen.”

Jess as a little girl
Jess as a little girl

 

The terror in Oranges is the terror of the family. Children don’t have any choice in who raises them and until they leave home they are, to some degree, at the mercy of their parents. Fruit also exposes the terror of religious fanaticism. Jess’s mother sees sin and evil everywhere except in the church and with “the redeemed”–which is why she keeps her daughter out of school until she’s 7. The pastor takes the idea of hellfire so literally that he keeps a fire extinguisher in the van he uses to preach in other towns.  They see The Devil in everything different from their own insular world, the church and their beliefs. Their perception of “a demon” in the teenaged Jess seems inevitable.

But Fruit frames fanaticism and not religious belief as the problem. Jess is close to an 80-something church lady, Elsie, (Margery Withers) who shows her many kindnesses. And the church and Jess’s sincere beliefs (which shine through Coleman’s radiant face when she talks about Jesus) gives her (and author Winterson, who published the book when she was 24) a confidence that is rare for women and girl characters in films and TV. When the pastor brings Jess and her girlfriend, Melanie (whom she converted!) in front of the congregation and tells them to repent for their “unnatural” passion, Melanie (Cathryn Bradshaw) bursts into tears and collapses on the floor but Jess, who is starting to preach herself, faces the pastor and quotes the Bible back to him, arguing that their love isn’t “unnatural” at all.

Her courage in standing up to the pastor would be rewarded in a lesser film (or one that was less autobiographical) but instead, as she struggles and shouts, she is tied up and gagged on the floor in a private parlor and “prayed over” for three days, without relent, until “the demon” is exorcised from her. Like most people who “confess” or “recant” during torture, Jess does so only to escape further harm. Right after she’s let go, she secretly meets up with the closeted queer member of the church-lady group, Miss Jewsbury (Celia Imrie) to give her a love letter to deliver to Melanie. Jess even continues to preach but eventually acquires another girlfriend (whom she also converts!) which permanently separates her from the church–and her home. She goes to live and work with her mother’s one acquaintance outside the church, the friendly, local undertaker, Cissy (Barbara Hicks), and at the end comes to a kind of peace with her past.

The pastor, Jess and her mother
The pastor, Jess, and her mother

 

Although the film doesn’t shy away from the damage the church and her mother’s fanaticism does (at one point Jess, as a child, is kept from medical treatment because the congregation believe she is experiencing a “miracle” instead of a raging infection) the audience comes to almost the point of admiration for Jess’s mother: as much as we can muster for someone who is wrong about everything. Her determination and exuberance (Winterson’s real adoptive mother wasn’t nearly as jaunty, which Winterson documents in the nonfiction Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) is like the wind in the sails of a ship and propels the action forward. McEwan later played another religious fanatic who was cruel to young women in The Magdalene Sisters, but here she’s no cardboard villain. She’s sometimes very funny, though often unwittingly so, playing church hymns on an organ which has an added disco beat or melodramatically wondering what the neighbors will think if she’s dragged away to prison for keeping Jess out of school. Jess, who has already absorbed large chunks of The Bible, then mentions that one of the saints spent time in prison to which her mother replies, “I know that, but the neighbors don’t!”

Charlotte Coleman (a former child TV star in Britain–whom many might remember as Scarlett from Four Weddings and a Funeral–she died at age 33) is a more than worthy foil to McEwan, a persuasive and joyful preacher on and off the pulpit and also a girl giddy with love, especially when she’s with her first girlfriend, Melanie. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the two of them in a tender love scene together: their small, slender bodies signaling to us their youth and the wide eyes they make at each other showing the depth of their feelings. Without an explicit scene I don’t think we would have absorbed that Jess’s faith in love is as strong–and eventually stronger–than her faith in God. For so many of us who came out in the decades before homophobia became unfashionable, we followed love (and sexual desire) the same way the devout are supposed to follow God, without question and without fear–in spite of all the terrible things we were told about queer people and their lives.  When Jess meets up with Miss Jewsbury she tells her that during the time she was prayed over she saw, or maybe hallucinated, the demon the group was trying to exorcise from her, “It was orange,” she says, the color of her hair. “It looked like me.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-D-CkBvSc0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender