[Commlist] Call for Chapter proposals: A force of habit: Nuns in popular culture

Nuns have a presence in cinema as longstanding as the medium itself, 
including the 1922 horror film /Haxan/. 2021’s /Benedetta/, a 
controversial but successful Paul Verhoeven film, is a recent 
restatement of the capacity for stories about women religious, or women 
in vocation normally called nuns, to be the source of powerful and 
successful works across all conceivable genres.

Statistics show the decline of religion in the western world but 
religion and its institutions maintain a prominent place in society and 
in creative outputs. Popular culture interprets, challenges and 
recreates religious practice and identity. At a time fewer people may be 
engaging with actual religious organisations or institutions, popular 
culture is more powerful than ever in shaping perceptions. Sexuality, 
agency, authority and leadership all register when popular culture turns 
attention to sisters in religious orders.

Nuns enable a rich array of story-telling types and genres, and 
character archetypes and stereotypes in both film and television. Nuns 
are central characters in some of the most popular and notable film and 
television productions of all time, among them /The Sound of Music, 
Black Narcissus, The Bells of St Mary/, and /Philomena /on the big 
screen and /Call the Midwife/ and /Brides of Christ/ on television. 
Alongside these major dramas lurk the disreputable works in the 
so-called ‘lost continent’ of exploitation and horror, from /Silent 
Night, Deadly Night/ and /American Horror Story /to the many films in 
the ‘nunsploitation’ grindhouse films.

Despite their prevalence in popular culture and the strongly consistent 
visual aesthetic of cinematic and televisual nuns because of the (often 
anachronistically retained) habit, the presence and meaning of religious 
sisters in popular culture has been little interrogated in academic 
literature.Rebecca Sullivan’s /Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and 
American Postwar Popular culture/ from 2005 is an important survey but 
is limited to the United States. Colleen McDannell’s /Material 
Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America /(1995) is now 
nearly 30 years old and takes a far wider focus than women religious. 
This collection therefore will be a timely and exciting opportunity to 
explore this multitude of works.

While the type and number of popular culture works about nuns is 
expansive and growing, especially in the years since earlier works on 
religion in popular culture were written, the specific focus of this 
collection will be for chapters exploring the appropriation of the 
imagery and activity of nuns by popular culture in ways that have often, 
but not universally, created on-screen nuns as a strange, disturbing or 
even abusive presence. Central to this collection will be exploration of 
the tensions between actual and fictional nuns and the potential found 
in genres from drama to comedy and others to raise questions about the 
identity, actions, reputations and agency of women in religious orders. 
In actuality, in the western world at least, the number of women 
pursuing a vocation as a religious is terminally declining. The nuns who 
remain are often a visually inconspicuous presence as post-Vatican II 
and other modernising trends mean religious habits are either reduced or 
wholly abandoned. Alongside and contrary to this real-world decline and 
visual eclipse, fully habited remain a major element of popular culture.

Nuns and other religious do retain some prominence but because of the 
number of official commissions and investigations into historic abuse in 
convent run orphanages, missions, schools, and laundries and from 
Ireland to Canada to Australia, stories of actual abuse have emerged 
worse than any possible cinematic horror. Similarly, non-fictional and 
documentary film making, have opened up tensions in perceptions of nuns 
from the laudatory presentation of Sister Helen Prejean in first 
documentary then film about the abolition of the death penalty to the 
competing portrayals of Mother Teresa in terms of both her public and 
private personae.

 From these points about the actual and the fictional, there extends 
exploration of the inherent strangeness of nuns, their vocations and 
their enclosed lives that frequently registers in popular culture. In 
short, the institutions western religious orders, the numbers, their 
viability and their reputations are pursuing complex and challenging 
trajectories in the modern world. Analogous to these actual issues of 
identity and practice are the expansive, prominent, and still growing 
works on nuns in popular culture. In this popular culture, nuns have 
been many things from the wise and caring presence of Hollywood classics 
such as /The Sound of Music/, the sinister and even satanic of horror 
movies, then sources of female agency, leadership and identity that may 
be an affront to or challenged by masculine authority such as in /Doubt 
/to /Two Mules for Sister Sara /and /Lambs of God/, to agents of abuse 
and neglect seen in /The Magdalene Sisters /and /Philomena/. Perhaps 
most often they are simply a strange and even challenging presence, a 
stranger to wider society, but still essential to popular culture. It is 
also important to note that religion is not declining in the global 
south, and popular culture there may be presenting its own impressions 
of female religious life.

There is a diversity of genres and works that could be considered as 
well as a rich number of themes including:

Comedy (/The Flying Nun/, /Nuns on the Run/, /Nasty Habits/, /The Blues 
Brothers/)

//

Horror//(/The Conjuring/,/The Nun/, /The Devils/, /American Horror Story/)

Musicals (/Sister Act/, /The Sound of Music/, /Nunsense/)

Period drama (/Brides of Christ/, /Call the Midwife/, /Pillars of the 
Earth/, /Extramuros/, /The Innocents/)

Science fiction (/Doctor Who/, /Warrior Nuns/, /Revelations/, /Sarah 
Jane Adventures/)

Drama (/Black Narcissus/, /Bells of St Mary’s/, /Nun’s Story/, /Doubt/)

Crime drama (/Father Dowling Mysteries/, /Sister Boniface Mysteries/, 
/Quiet as a Nun/)

The representation of nuns and their environments in period and modern 
settings

Iconography and the semiotics of religion

Feminism and religious authority

Confronting or perpetrating crime and evil

Documentary and non-fiction and the examination of religious histories

Controversies and past injustices

Celebrity nuns or notorious nuns

Nuns who singularise

Public and private lives and the spaces of religious vocation

Other enclosed communities in fictions (finishing schools, academies, 
sororities)

We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider 
addressing the intersection of nuns with popular culture in light of the 
reflections offered above on fictional and non-fictional representations 
of nuns and the use and appropriation of their distinctive iconography.

Television and film from different national contexts will be welcome.

*/Advice for contributors/*

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, we ask that 
you submit an abstract of up to 250 words explaining the focus and 
approach your proposed essay.The proposed volume is intended to be 
scholarly but accessible in tone and approach. Each contribution should 
be around 6000 words.Abstracts should be emailed to 
(marcus.harmes /at/ usq.edu.au) <mailto:(marcus.harmes /at/ usq.edu.au)>by March 31st 
2023 and contributors with successful abstracts will be notified in 
mid-April.

Full chapters would be expected by 29 September 2023.

An American publisher is interested in this proposal. Editors are Marcus 
K Harmes and Meredith Harmes, University of Southern Queensland.


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------