Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture
Alexandra Boutros
2006
Canadian Journal of Communication
Pop culture images of religion are often the visible signals of a sometimes uneasy confluence of factors. Fervour in the early months of 2006 over the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper is an example of how the visual culture of mass media can instigate public debate and highlight tensions over religious imagery, belief, and identity. Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture provides a snapshot of these sometimes fraught
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... onships in the ferment of social change in postwar America. During this time, from 1950 to 1971, American ideals of individualism and modernity, the emergence of the feminist movement, and changes in the institutional structure and influence of the Catholic Church in America were intersecting in intricate ways. Visual Habits teases apart the complex and multiple forces that shaped representations of nuns during this period through an unpacking of a variety of media, including film, television, and popular music. Films such as The Sound of Music and Lilies of the Field and television shows such as The Flying Nun are perhaps the most readily recalled instances of the proliferation of representations of nuns in postwar America. While it may seem incongruous that the nunsynonymous for many with chastity and virginity-became such a visible icon at the same time that feminism was calling for a sexual revolution, Rebecca Sullivan suggests that the nun was not simply a reactionary image that positioned the chaste nun as a morally superior alternative to the sexually liberated woman. Rather, images of nuns in popular culture were potent visual signifiers encoded with a host of sometimes conflicting and often fluctuating meanings. While it is easy to assume that popular images circulating in mass media and mass entertainment are distorted representations produced at a distance from the everyday experiences and practices of religious practitioners, nuns or "women religious" were often agents in the construction of their own image. The publication of vocational material, which was meant to encourage young girls to contemplate joining a convent, was an obvious medium through which women religious were able to disseminate images of themselves and their religious practices. These women also had a hand in the literal production of their image when they acted as
doi:10.22230/cjc.2006v31n4a1798
fatcat:vubycjipwrfvhgzph4vezdgauu