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

Rethinking Women’s Suffering and Holiness: Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Holy Relics”

Volume 36 Number 2
Author(s):
Pearl Maria Barros
Abstract:

In the poem, “Holy Relics,” Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) interrogated Christian imaginaries of female holiness by troubling existing stories that locate holiness in passivity, suffering, and silence. Creatively envisioning the tearing apart of Teresa of Ávila's body for the sake of collecting relics, Anzaldúa showed how this notion of holiness can lead to an objectification of women's bodies and an attempt to manipulate their power. Furthermore, she revealed how conceptions of wholeness/holiness already carry fragmentation within them. By reimagining wholeness and fragmentation, Anzaldúa offered a way of rethinking suffering, one in which brokenness opens a space through which new identities and ways of being can emerge.


Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.36.2.03
Back to: https://www.fsrinc.org/journal/volume-36-number-2/

Recent Blog Posts

  • Black Women’s Bodies On My Mind

    January 21, 2021
  • Roll/Role Call: Invocation, Remembrance, Lamentation, and #SayHerName (@theTable: “Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion”)

    January 15, 2021
  • @theTable: “Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion”

    January 14, 2021
  • Off the Press: 2020 in Review

    January 5, 2021
  • When the Subaltern Speaks! Why Caste Must Matter in the Case of Hathras

    December 29, 2020

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