While a woman’s identity is constructed on multiple sites, it is the Catholic Church which constructs, regulates and ascribes meaning to the life of the Catholic Nun. In this thesis, which adopts a Foucauldian and feminist approach, an examination of six important Church texts relating to Nuns‟ lives identifies three dominant discursive constructions of Nun, namely the Nun as called by God, to sacrifice her life, and to work for the Church in its mission. Individual and focus group interview data from a sample of 43 Nuns in Australia and New Zealand is examined for ways in which Nuns negotiate such constructions in their experience of being Nuns. The Church’s discursive truths of what it is to be Nun, learnt during the process of subjectification of the Novitiate or training process, continue to be taken up by Nuns in this study. Functioning as the Institutional Self, they position themselves as docile Church women, loyal to the Church and its mission. However, they also resist the Church’s truths and material practices for their lives, functioning as the Individuated Self, a self refusing to be regulated by such truths and material practices laid down by the Church. Nuns in this study show evidence of adopting fluid positioning, functioning neither wholly as Institutional Self nor as Individuated Self, since they give accounts of both taking up and resisting the Church’s constructions of Nun. However, it is in the position of resistance that they contribute to the creation of new notions of what it is to be ‘Nun’, namely the Nun as an autonomous woman, exercising personal agency in her life, and working not necessarily for the Church, but for the poor and the marginalised in the world. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/181779 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Brock, Megan P., University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Social Sciences |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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