Narrative navigation of former nuns: Exploring stories of transgression, reflexivity and transcendence through life history

这个跨学科的项目将采用生活史的方法来探索前爱尔兰妇女宗教（修女）的生活，其中之一是我的母亲。它将考虑导致他们进入20世纪50年代爱尔兰宗教秩序的个人和社会因素的多元化，并在梵蒂冈二世（1962-1965）之前和之后，揭示他们作为宗教的隐藏生活。这项研究将展示他们后来如何重新想象另一个自我，并在几十年后离开修道院生活，重新进入他们十几岁时就放弃的世俗世界。我利用“航行”的寓言作为一个隐喻来询问剥夺/收回。很少有基于口头证据的奖学金存在于如何搬迁到会众以外的生活是由前妇女宗教经历。考虑到这些女性现在已经八十多岁了，我将通过探索作为一名前修女如何塑造她们叙事身份的整体配置来解决这个差距。在当时的社会、文化和政治背景下调查妇女的生活故事将是一个中心焦点。为了理解他们在一个主张通过绝对一致来消除个性的宗教机构中为代理权而进行的斗争，有必要考虑这样一个总机构（Goffman，1968）在梵蒂冈二世之前的爱尔兰（一个以经济和文化孤立主义为特征的时期）所拥有的权力。教会和国家的二元关系传播的主要叙事注入了当时的文化和政治气候，决定了可用的社会脚本。对于爱尔兰妇女来说，这往往是一个充满了历史时刻的文化价值观的选择-婚姻或修道院。本研究将探讨如何通过叙事资本的部署（古德森，2013），女性导航这些社会脚本，并着手实现另一种未来。

This interdisciplinary project will adopt a life history approach to explore the lives of former Irish women religious (nuns), one of whom is my mother. It will consider the plurality of individual and social factors leading to their entry into a religious order in 1950s Ireland and shine a light on their hidden lives as religious prior to, and following, Vatican II (1962-1965). The study will show how they subsequently came tore-imagine an alternative self and navigated the transgressive process of leaving convent life decades later to re-enter the secular world they renounced as teenagers. I draw on the allegory of the 'navigation' as a metaphor to interrogate dispossession/repossession. Little scholarship based on oral evidence exists on how a relocation to life outside the congregation was experienced by former women religious. I will address this gap by exploring how being a former nun shaped the overall configuration of the women's narrative identity, given that they are now in their eighties. Investigating the women's life stories within the contemporaneous social, cultural and political context will be a central focus. In order to understand their struggle for agency within a religious institution which advocated an erasing of individuality through absolute conformity, it is necessary to consider the power such a total institution (Goffman,1968) wielded on pre-Vatican II Ireland, a period characterised by economic and cultural isolationism. The master narratives circulated by the dyad of Church and State infused the cultural and political climate of the time, dictating the social scripts available. For Irish women, imbued with the cultural values of the historical moment, this was often a choice between two institutions -marriage or the convent. This study will investigate how, through the deployment of narrative capital(Goodson,2013), the women navigated these social scripts and set about achieving an alternative future.