Further on fictional nuns and monks
Still thinking about this post and the responses, including one that is in a locked post of
madam_silvertip (no, this never did show up as a posted comment).
And things that leapt out at me more or less:
Women writing about male religious, far more than the reverse (except, I suppose for Teh Pr0n/anticlericalist satire from the C18th or so, come on down, Denis Diderot! - whom I don't think got mentioned).
The extraordinarily high incidence of violence &/or death in novels featuring male religious communities (so many of the ones mentioned were specifically genre crime), except for the ones that are about the development of gay awakening.
Which gave me to recall a conference paper by Sandor Gilman I heard years ago and may well misremember (late 80s?), about touch in Art, meaning mostly western art of the C16th-C17th, and about how women may be represented as touching (and in not a few cases one may note, touching up: river landscape with bathing nymphs, anyone?) but men, except for Jesus, not -
To which going round various French art galleries soon after made me add the corollary, unless of course the men in question are doing violence one upon the other, or if one of the men in question is dead or about to expire.
And I wonder how this intersects with the whole men-in-wartime-extremity being allowed to care for one another fairly overtly theme.
I don't have any snappy conclusions about this, but, hmmm, interesting...
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1109210.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.