The film Stigmata & the Challenge of Conceptualizing Women as Spiritual Agents :: Free Essays Online

The instanceisation Stigmata & the Challenge of Conceptualizing Women as Spiritual AgentsThe history of Western religion has, for the most part been a history of mens spiritual stories, practices, and writings. It is quite rare and exceptional to envision accounts of religion or practicing collections that place womens fetchs at the center. Books, exposures, and various other heathen products bear this out by demonstrating a stubborn lack of circumspection to womens religious experiences. At first glance, the movie Stigmata seems like a film that defies this generalization. The movie, starring Patricia Arquette, places a female protagonist and her mystical experiences with Christ at the center of the plot. The wo piece of music is modeled after a great name in the Catholic tradition, St. Francis, and hers is seemingly the story around which the entire movie is structured. Though this apparently unusual use of a womans direct experience with paragon seems on an immediate l evel to be very transgressive, however, the film ends up being even more hegemonic, in a maven because of the way in which it subtly reinforces normative notions of the male-centeredness of supernatural experiences of God in the Catholic tradition.In this paper I impart look at how Stigmata represents sex and gender roles in the Catholic church and in unsanctified America and of how it uses womens sexuality and assumptions about womens lack of spiritual agency to in conclusion undermine the legitimacy of authentic feminine experience with the Christian God. I will argue that the movies emphasis on very structuralist notions of good and evil, man and woman, pure and impure, inevitably sets up a system in which a females religious authority will be lost. A decrepit tradition, as the Catholic church most certainly represents, must always quiver to accommodate the abnormality of a woman experiencing a direct conjoin with God. The unwillingness to imagine a situation in which a ch aracter like that of Patricia Arquettes character, Frankie, would have a legitimate direct experience with God is a common one throughout the Western (and Western-occupied) world. The emphasis on only granting legitimacy to the written word in the Western religious tradition has always created an environment of hostility to womens non-discursive religious experiences. This paper will also look at how the religious conflicts between the Western patriarchal tradition and female members of a non-Western religious tradition (specifically a group of Ngarrindjeri women) have unfolded and at how such conflicts are similar to the conflict that is delineated between Frankie and the priests who would control her in Stigmata.