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. This collection therefore will be a timely and exciting opportunity to explore this multitude of works. 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. 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. 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.ĭespite 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. 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. Nuns enable a rich array of story-telling types and genres, and character archetypes and stereotypes in both film and television. Sexuality, agency, authority and leadership all register when popular culture turns attention to sisters in religious orders. At a time fewer people may be engaging with actual religious organisations or institutions, popular culture is more powerful than ever in shaping perceptions. Popular culture interprets, challenges and recreates religious practice and identity. 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. 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. Nuns have a presence in cinema as longstanding as the medium itself, including the 1922 horror film Haxan.
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