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宗教女性(修女)的生活，其中一位是我的母亲。它将考虑导致他们在20世纪50年代爱尔兰进入宗教秩序的多种个人和社会因素，并揭示他们在梵蒂冈二世(1962-1965)之前和之后隐藏的宗教生活。这项研究将展示他们后来是如何撕裂-想象一个另类的自我，并在几十年后离开修道院生活，重新进入他们十几岁时抛弃的世俗世界的越轨过程。我引用了“航海”这个寓言作为一个比喻来审问剥夺/收回。关于前宗教女性如何经历搬迁到会众以外的生活，几乎没有基于口头证据的学术研究。我将通过探索作为一名前修女如何塑造女性叙事身份的整体结构来解决这一差距，因为她们现在已经80多岁了。在同时代的社会、文化和政治背景下考察女性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内为代理而进行的斗争，有必要考虑这样一个总体机构(Goffman，1968)对梵蒂冈二世前爱尔兰的权力，这是一个以经济和文化孤立主义为特征的时期。由教会和国家的二元组流传的主要叙事注入了当时的文化和政治氛围，口述了可用的社会剧本。对于被历史时刻的文化价值观浸透的爱尔兰女性来说，这往往是在两个机构中做出选择--婚姻或修道院。这项研究将调查，通过运用叙事资本(Goodson，2013)，女性如何驾驭这些社会剧本，并开始实现另一种未来。

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.