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

The film Stigmata & the Challenge of Conceptualizing Women as Spiritual Agents The history of Western religion has, for the most part been a history of men's religious stories, practices, and writings. It is quite rare and exceptional to find accounts of religion or practicing groups that place women's experiences at the center. Books, films, and various other cultural products bear this out by demonstrating a stubborn lack of attention to women's 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 woman 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 woman's direct experience with God seems on an immediate level to be very transgressive, however, the film ends up being 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 look at how Stigmata represents sex and gender roles in the Catholic church and in secular America and of how it uses women's sexuality and assumptions about women's lack of spiritual agency to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of authentic feminine experience with the Christian God. I will argue that the movie's emphasis on very structuralist notions of good and evil, man and woman, pure and impure, inevitably sets up a system in which a female's religious authority will be lost. A patriarchal tradition, as the Catholic church most certainly represents, must always scramble to accommodate the abnormality of a woman experiencing a direct link with God. The unwillingness to imagine a situation in which a character like that of Patricia Arquette's 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 rel igious tradition has always created an environment of hostility to women's 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 control her in Stigmata.