Show Sidebar Log in
  • Home
  • About Us
    • News
    • Admin
  • Journal
    • About JFSR
    • People
    • Features
    • Volumes
    • Subscriptions
    • Submissions
    • Advertising
  • Blog
    • About the FSR Blog
    • People
    • Submissions
    • @theTable
  • Books
    • All Titles
    • About FSR Books
    • FSR Bookstore
  • LAB
    • About LAB
    • People
    • Feminists Talk Religion Podcast
  • Across Generations
    • Description
    • Process
    • Video Projects
  • Donate
  • Conferences
  • Awards

Habitual Gender: Rhetorical Androgyny in Franciscan Texts

Volume 31 Number 1
Author(s):
Christina Cedillo
Abstract:

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award Second-Place Winner

This article examines the notion of “rhetorical androgyny” in medieval and contemporary Franciscan hagiography. Rhetorical androgyny is androgyny that exists as spiritual motivation in religious texts but finds no corollary in everyday life due to social constraints. Depictions of St. Francis of Assisi's transformation stress his assumption of feminine characteristics, but even as androgynous existence is upheld as the epitome of pious achievement, the very definition of androgyny is problematized. A demonstration of feminine qualities enhances the male saint while the woman saint closest to him, Clare of Assisi, may not assimilate masculinity. Nevertheless, the female saint achieves a higher state of androgyny in medieval sources than she does in modern representation due to a foregrounding of the tension between social constraints and spiritual ideals in religious texts of the Middle Ages.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.31.1.65

Back to Volume 31, Number 1

Recent Blog Posts

  • Off the Press (February 2021)

    February 5, 2021
  • CFB: “Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion,” FSR Blog’s Call for Blog Roundtable Responses

    February 2, 2021
  • Revisiting Matriarchy in Brazil (@theTable: “Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion”)

    February 1, 2021
  • Colaboración as an Antiracist Methodology in the Feminist Study of Religion (@theTable: “Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion”)

    January 22, 2021
  • Black Women’s Bodies On My Mind

    January 21, 2021

Recent JFSR Articles

  • The Syrophoenician Woman

    September 11, 2020
  • On Covid-19, U.S. Uprisings, and Black Lives: A Mandate to Regenerate All Our Relations

    September 11, 2020
  • Full Catastrophe Mentoring: A Conversation

    September 11, 2020

Contact Us

Managing Office: [email protected]

Journal Office: [email protected]

Blog Office: [email protected]

>> More Contacts

Copyright 2015 © Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.
All rights reserved. Direct questions to [email protected]

Login