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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.