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

The film Stigmata & the Challenge of Conceptualizing Women as Spiritual AgentsThe score of Western religion has, for the most part been a history of mens religious stories, practices, and writings. It is quite rare and exceptional to find accounts of religion or practicing groups that place womens experiences at the center. Books, films, and various other cultural products bear this by by demonstrating a stubborn lack of attention 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 feminine protagonist and her mystical experiences with Christ at the center of the plot. The char is modeled after a great figure 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 God seems on an immediate level to be very transgressive, however, the f ilm ends up cosmos even more hegemonic, in a sense 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 will aroma at how Stigmata represents sex and sexual activity roles in the Catholic church service and in secular America and of how it uses womens sexual practice and assumptions about womens lack of spiritual agency to ultimately undermine the authenticity of authentic feminine experience with the Christian God. I will fence in that the movies emphasis on very structuralist notions of good and evil, man and woman, pure and impure, ineluctably sets up a system in which a females religious situation will be lost. A patriarchal tradition, as the Catholic church most certainly represents, must unendingly scramble to accommodate the abnormality of a woman experiencing a direct link with God. The unwillingness to think a situation in which a character like tha t of Patricia Arquettes character, Frankie, would carry a legitimate direct experience with God is a reciprocal one throughout the Western (and Western-occupied) world. The emphasis on only granting genuineness 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 represented between Frankie and the priests who would authorisation her in Stigmata.