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WORK TITLE: Pornography: structures, agency and performance
WORK NOTES: with Alan McKee
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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NATIONALITY:
https://english.ucalgary.ca/profiles/rebecca-sullivan * http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745651933.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1966.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, B.A., 2012; Carleton University, M.A., 2012; McGill University, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, professor of English, director of the Institute for Gender Research.
AWARDS:Killam Resident Fellow, 2003-04; senior fellow, Institute for United States Policy Research, 2007-08; two SSHRC standard research grants; fellow, Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 2010-11.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Rebecca Sullivan specializes in feminist media and cultural studies. Her research focuses on feminist film, gender and sexuality, and political and legal frameworks for women’s agency and bodily integrity in the public sphere. She is professor of English and director of the Institute for Gender Research at the University of Calgary, in Alberta. She has written books on nuns in popular culture, feminist pornography, and pornography in Canadian film. She holds a Ph.D. in communications from McGill University.
In 2005, Sullivan published Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture, which explores the 1950s and 1960s as a time when traditional values of the Catholic church clashed with the women’s rights movement. During this time, nuns were experimenting with their traditional roles, removing their habits and fighting for social justice. Sullivan traces the portrayal of nuns in popular culture in response to three major changes in society and the church: the Second Vatican Council, the second wave of feminism, and the sexual revolution.
Movies and television shows like The Nun’s Story, The Flying Nun, and The Singing Nun did not reflect the political and social changes taking place. Rather, according to Sullivan, they portrayed largely false and ludicrous symbolism and an iconic power that popular culture attributed to nuns at the time. More broadly, popular culture established conventions for the ways women’s struggles for equality and independence were portrayed. Torn between nostalgia and progress, nuns represented a contradictory sense of closure.
Online at the Catholic Books Review, Patrick J. Hayes commented: “There is a sense that throughout her work, Sullivan is relentless, but fair. I found this to be a thought provoking study that was tightly argued from beginning to end. As such, this penetrating and balanced volume will do well in courses on feminist theology or American Catholic studies.” R.J. Stevenson remarked in Herizons magazine: “The references in the book will also serve readers well in broadening their appreciation for these important yet often overlooked revolutionaries of the women’s movement.”
Sullivan’s 2014 title Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” examines the first Canadian film to explore pornography’s role in society from a feminist perspective. Klein, who worked for Studio D, the National Film Board’s women’s unit, directed the movie in which she and Lindalee Tracey, an activist and stripper, toured the sex trade in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco. Released in 1981, the film was banned in some cities. Sullivan discusses the history of the film, censorship, sexual performance, feminism in pornography, and Canada’s women’s movement. Barbara M. Freeman noted in the Journal of the History of Sexuality that Sullivan “deftly takes on the daunting role of the revisionist—daunting particularly in light of the vicious, mistaken, and still lingering criticisms that greeted the film during and after the so-called Porn Wars, which split the feminist movement in North America at that time.”
Sullivan partnered with Alan McKee, professor at the University of Technology Sydney, to publish the 2015 volume Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance. An overview of pornography today, the book discusses what pornography is, who it is made for, production issues, various sexualities portrayed, the view of pornography in the framework of consent and self-determination, and its use in academic study. The authors also discuss radical antiporn activists, feminist pornography, and queer porn, and they present some of the voices of people in the industry. They explain that pornography is neither good nor bad, but reflects the gender hierarchy that exists in society in general. Writing in Choice, Y. Kiuchi commented that the authors “characterize and define pornography but also discuss the implications of pornography and changes they wish to see.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, Y. Kiuchi, review of Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance, p. 1203.
Herizons, summer, 2006, R.J. Stevenson, review of Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture, p. 41.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, January, 2016, Barbara M. Freeman, review of Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story,” p. 211.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of Visual Habits.
ONLINE
Catholic Books Review, http://catholicbooksreview.org/ (February 27, 2017), review of Visual Habits.
University of Calgary Web site, https://english.ucalgary.ca/ (April 1, 2017), author profile.
LC control no.: no2005074913
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Sullivan, Rebecca, 1966-
Birth date: 1966
Found in: Visual habits, c2005: t.p. (Rebecca Sullivan) Can. CIP
(Sullivan, Rebecca, 1966- )
Pornography, 2015: eCIP t.p. (Rebecca Sullivan) data view
screen (Professor at the University of Calgary,
specializing in gender and popular culture)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Rebecca Sullivan
Professor
+1 (403) 220-3397
Social Sciences 1142
rsulliva@ucalgary.ca
Research Interests
Research Interests:
Feminist Film, Media and Cultural Studies
Gender and Sexuality
Currently Teaching
Not currently teaching any courses.
view past courses
Research
Rebecca Sullivan specializes in feminist media and cultural studies. Her work bridges analysis of popular cultural representations with media industries and political, legal and regulatory frameworks that circumscribe women's agency and bodily integrity in the public sphere.
She is the author of Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture (2005),the co-author of Canadian Television Today (2006) and Becoming Biosubjects (2011), and co-editor of How Canadians Communicate: Contexts of Popular Culture (2010).
Rebecca is currently a Fellow in the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (2010-11). She is a past Killam Resident Fellow (2003-4) and past Senior Fellow of the Institute for United States Policy Research (2007-8). She has held two SSHRC standard research grants and is currently developing a national team-based project on Canadian Porn Cultures.
Publications
Book
Gerlach, Neil, Sullivan, Rebecca, Hamilton, Sheryl and Walton, Priscilla. Becoming Biosubjects. Bodies. Systems. Technologies University of Toronto Press, 2011. Print.
Beaty, Bart, Briton, Derek, Filax, Gloria and Sullivan, Rebecca. How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts of Canadian Popular Culture Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, 2010. Print.
Beaty, Bart and Sullivan, Rebecca. Canadian Television Today Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006. Print.
Sullivan, Rebecca. Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture University of Toronto Press, 2005. Print.
Degrees
PhD - Communications
McGill University, 2012
MA - Mass Communication
Carleton University, 2012
BA - Arts Administration
University of Toronto, 2012
Rebecca Sullivan
Porn is a part of our culture. Why shouldn’t universities study it?
Rebecca Sullivan
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Apr. 02, 2014 10:31AM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Apr. 02, 2014 1:16PM EDT
0 Comments
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Recent discussions of the upcoming Feminist Porn Conference and the Ninth Annual Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto reveal a more uncomfortable truth than the fact that university students are interested in pornography. They reveal the inability of Canadian journalism to address questions regarding sexually explicit media without reverting to dangerous us-them argumentation that demeans the experiences of sexual minorities.
Those discussions, on the heels of commentary over Canadian-content regulations for pornography channels, all lead to the same conclusion: Pornography is something good, decent Canadians don’t think about.
Quite simply, there is no other aspect of our media that is as poorly understood as pornography. Where is it produced and how is it marketed? What are the working conditions for those both in front and behind the camera? Who is accessing it, and how? What are the differences between various forms of pornography and how they represent sex and sexuality? Once we find answers to these questions, we may be able to ask better ones about how we discriminate against people based on their sexual identity and sex practices.
Our ignorance about pornography practices in Canada, and our desire to pretend that it’s only something that happens elsewhere, makes conversations about sex and sexuality more difficult and less complex. This is a problem because sexuality is a critical part of how we define ourselves and relate to each other. No matter how hard we try to deny it, pornography is a part of our sexual culture.
Rather than hide our heads in the sand, we should be asking what pornography looks like in Canada. For example, one of the few studies of pornography consumption in Canada couldn’t find any heterosexual men in their twenties who had never watched porn. Furthermore, the study concluded that pornography had little to no impact on these men’s perception of women in general or of their sexual partners in particular.
We know even less about the Canadian pornography industry than we know about its consumers, other than that Montreal has a reputation as Canada’s “porn capital,” and that many Canadian producers specialize in so-called amateur and docuporn. The industry and its workers remain marginalized and misunderstood.
Some pornographies practically serve as manuals for the oppression of women and sexually marginalized peoples. Others are challenging gender norms and body images, giving voice to diverse sexual experiences that are otherwise repressed in our society. Similarly, production runs the gamut from the collective and collaborative to the coerced and exploited. Understanding these differences is crucial to improving the way we think and talk about sexuality.
We should be demanding better conversations about pornography in our news media and classrooms. These conversations should begin from the position that there is nothing intrinsically shameful about watching or creating sexually explicit media. Once we remove that veneer of societal disgust – and judging by pornography’s ubiquity in Canada, it is merely a veneer – we can begin to talk about sexual expression as a human right that should always be self-determining, authentic, and empowering of ourselves and others. That’s how we create a truly decent society.
Rebecca Sullivan is director of the Institute for Gender Research at the University of Calgary.
Sullivan, Rebecca. Pornography: structures, agency and performance
Y. Kiuchi
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1203.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Sullivan, Rebecca. Pornography: structures, agency and performance, by Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee. Polity, 2015. 219p bibl index ISBN 9780745651934 cloth, $64.95; ISBN 9780745651941 pbk, $22.95; ISBN 9780745694849 ebook, $18.99
(cc) 53-3563
HQ471
2015-6156 MARC
Pornography is one of the most, if not the most, controversial topics in the present media-heavy society. In this introductory work, Sullivan (English, Univ. of Calgary) and McKee (faculty administration, Univ. of Technology, Sydney, Australia) not only characterize and define pornography but also discuss the implications of pornography and changes they wish to see in connection with pornography. Arguing that pornography is neither positive nor negative, the authors make a realistic claim that no matter how hard opponents of pornography try to eradicate it, pornography will continue to exist. They contend that pornography is similar to any other entertainment in that it simply reflects the gender hierarchy and power dynamics that exist in the larger society. Using this premise, the authors examine pornography as a global industry; pornography and online technology; and pornography and violence, sexual citizenship, and sexual politics. Although they understand that there are problems with pornography as presently understood, they conclude that "we must strive to make [pornography] better. To do that, we need to listen to those whose lives are most at stake." Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.--Y. Kiuchi, Michigan State University
Kiuchi, Y.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kiuchi, Y. "Sullivan, Rebecca. Pornography: structures, agency and performance." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1203. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661694&it=r&asid=bfe9c1a72d10b80ae4ae364dbd7df731. Accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661694
Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture
R.J. Stevenson
20.1 (Summer 2006): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
VISUAL HABITS: NUNS, FEMINISM AND AMERICAN POSTWAR POPULAR CULTURE
Rebecca Sullivan
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS, 2005
The post-war period was a time that ushered in many changes, and it proffered many arresting images in that regard. The traditional values of church and state were being challenged with the ongoing demands of the civil rights movement, while the advent of feminism and the sexual revolution enabled women of all backgrounds to examine their lives as never before. How ironic, then, that "women religious"--nuns--would appear as the harbingers of a new age alongside the likes of Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown!
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture explores this provocative era through the lens of Catholic nuns, and their media portrayal as icons, against a backdrop of shifting societal conventions. Author Rebecca Sullivan, assistant professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary, suggests: "Their representations against a highly sexualized culture offer exciting new lines of inquiry for feminist media and cultural studies"
The book is intended to scrutinize portrayals of nuns in the media, specifically during the '50s and '60s. Through images presented in film, music, television and books (vocational and otherwise), Sullivan examines how the nun operated as a kind of transitional figure at the intersection of the Second Vatican Council, the second wave of feminism and the sexual revolution.
Visual Habits is a well-researched adjunct to any line of inquiry in feminist cultural studies. The references in the book will also serve readers well in broadening their appreciation for these important yet often overlooked revolutionaries of the women's movement.
Review by R.J. Stevenson
Stevenson, R.J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stevenson, R.J. "Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture." Herizons, Summer 2006, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA148008186&it=r&asid=570ed35822c5d5d36ef16484da8c0f0b. Accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A148008186
Visual habits; nuns, feminism, and American postwar popular culture
21.3 (Aug. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
0802037763
Visual habits; nuns, feminism, and American postwar popular culture.
Sullivan, Rebecca.
U. of Toronto Pr.
2005
255 pages
$29.95
Paperback
BR115
Long the target of curiosity and speculation, Catholic nuns and sisters have always lived within the contexts of more than one culture, including that of the professed religious and that of their place in the secular world. Sullivan (U. of Calgary) examines these and the new culture created by the rise of feminism within the professed religious and the impact of Vatican II by analyzing the media's version of nun culture. She explores how religion changed within culture in the 1950s on to become refuge, an expression of private practice over public profession, and how by doing so it became feminized and therefore devalued. Sullivan covers quite a bit of ground, making good use of interviews as well as her analysis of what the media understood.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Visual habits; nuns, feminism, and American postwar popular culture." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA148974161&it=r&asid=188563c535113185d64d351a6e8a3948. Accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A148974161
Bonnie Sherr Klein's "Not a Love Story." By Rebecca Sullivan
Barbara M. Freeman
25.1 (Jan. 2016): p211.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7560/JHS25107
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress
Bonnie Sherr Klein's "Not a Love Story." By Rebecca Sullivan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014, Canadian Cinema Series, no. 12. Pp. 144. $49.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper); $18.95 (e-book).
Rebecca Sullivan's study of Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography presents a timely, detailed retrospective and critique of this groundbreaking feminist documentary, which was produced in 1981. Sullivan, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, deftly takes on the daunting role of the revisionist--daunting particularly in light of the vicious, mistaken, and still lingering criticisms that greeted the film during and after the so-called Porn Wars, which split the feminist movement in North America at that time. Not a Love Story, which was as deliberately and daringly graphic as the porn it depicted, was never about censorship as such, Sullivan convincingly argues. Instead the film focused on the unresolved tensions between sexual liberation and the pornography industry--the magazines, videos, and live sex shows--that had begun to openly proliferate in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the Internet. At the time, many feminists wanted to claim eroticism as a positive force for women but saw the porn that objectified them as harmful to the female partners of the straight men who consumed graphic sexual images and sex club performances. Critics, including some other feminists, argued strenuously against this perspective because they were concerned that it confused erotic play with pornography; was not supportive of sex workers; was essentially middle class, Eurocentric, and heterosexist; and would only encourage more official censorship of artistic freedoms, including their own.
Sullivan effectively situates Not a Love Story in the cultural context of feminist documentary filmmaking at Studio D, which was the cutting-edge women's studio at the National Film Board of Canada. Klein had initially approached the project without a firm antiporn agenda but changed her mind during the making of the film after she interviewed the people involved, including performers, as is clear in her interviews of several leading American antiporn feminists, a retired male porn star, and other male critics. While Sullivan gives Klein a great deal of leeway in expressing her retrospective views of the film and her relationships with the people involved in it, she writes most sympathetically of the woman who played a pivotal role as an on-camera guide to the sex industry, the late Lindalee Tracey. Tracey, a smart, gutsy, energetic young woman, was working as a part-time stripper when the film was made, a role she defended on camera while roundly criticizing the dismissive ways in which the sex industry and its clients treated sex workers. Klein and her crew filmed several of them performing their acts and then interviewed them. Tracey had demanded agency over the three key scenes in which she herself took center stage: stripping in a Montreal club; publicly reciting one of her poetic critiques of male clients outside a sex emporium in New York City and then arguing with them; and experimentally posing for Suze Randall, a photographer at Hustler magazine in Los Angeles who pushed Tracey past her own boundaries during the graphic photo shoot that served as one of the final scenes in the film.
Although Tracey had access to the editing process and took part in the flurry of public viewings and panel discussions that followed the film's release, she later openly criticized Klein and producer Dorothy Todd Henaut, claiming that the final version of the film undercut her own agency and personal intentions, which were not the same as those of Klein (who did most of the interviews) or the antiporn feminists who commented throughout the film. It was a painful break between Klein and Tracey, who, despite their differences in outlook, had become close friends during the making of the documentary. Tracey went on to become a respected writer and filmmaker in her own right before she died of cancer in 2006, while Klein made a film about the peace movement before a devastating series of strokes sidelined her career for two decades. Eventually, she produced documentaries about disability.
In presenting her complex but very accessible analysis of Not a Love Story, Sullivan draws on retrospective interviews with Klein, Henaut, associate director and editor Anne Henderson, cameraman Pierre Letarte, and several long-time Canadian feminists. She also examines Tracey's 1997 autobiography and extant interviews, the film itself and its archived production notes, NFB contracts, distribution and audience response documents, and media critiques of the film and other material. My only quibble about this compelling study is that Sullivan is too quick to criticize some of the antiporn feminists featured in the film in a way that may further demonize them in the eyes of the current generation, although her critiques of how these interviews were used, especially in juxtaposition to Tracey's segments, are well rendered. Her study could also have used a deeper historical context. It does not discuss the confusing impact of the sexual liberation movement, which encouraged both men and women to claim their erotic selves while simultaneously promoting the spread of easily accessible pornography of all kinds, some of it quite violent. Furthermore, in the 1980s in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, girls and young women were still legally and socially oppressed by systemic sexism. Many second wave feminists regarded straight male pornography as antithetical to women's sexual agency and as one of the more controversial symptoms of the widespread sexist attitudes that robbed them of their basic equality rights. Given the current richness of the fields of women's, gender, and sexuality history, a page or two about that political and cultural context, beyond the "Further Reading" list, would have been very useful, especially for scholars and students too young to remember those days.
I strongly recommend that before reading Sullivan's analysis you view the film, which ironically is still not accessible for streaming or downloading in the NFB's own web catalog of free films, at least not as of this writing. It is available in various libraries.
DOI: 10.7560/JHS25107
BARBARA M. FREEMAN
Carleton University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Freeman, Barbara M. "Bonnie Sherr Klein's 'Not a Love Story.' By Rebecca Sullivan." Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, p. 211+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA440820730&it=r&asid=449c645dfa107d47d66b13f792317cbc. Accessed 27 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A440820730
Rebecca SULLIVAN, Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. xi + 255, $29.95 pb; $65.00, hc, ISBN: 0-8020-3776-3.
Reviewed by PATRICK J. HAYES, Marymount College of Fordham University, Tarrytown, NY 10591
As someone who, as a young boy, was fascinated and weirdly smitten with Sr. Bertrille, aka “The Flying Nun,” played by Sally Field, Rebecca Sullivan’s book was like going into some long-needed therapy. Sullivan takes a deconstructive approach to media portrayals of women religious, exposing as largely false and ludicrous the symbolism and iconic value popular culture placed on these women from the dawn of television in the 1950s to the present day. The critique she offers is in the two-fold interest of modern feminism, which she hopes will come to a new appreciation of women religious, and cultural studies which she faults as having neglected religion generally and convent culture in particular. Her analysis mainly succeeds in presenting women religious as far more than the visual ciphers presented on screen or in magazines.
An introduction to the field of cultural studies and its relation to certain strands of modern feminism provides a context for Sullivan’s ensuing chapters. If this text is used in the classroom, I predict that some undergraduates may be lost in the theory. Sullivan has a tendency to name drop. Unfortunately, most collegians will have had little or no exposure to the particular currents of thought for which these authors are known. Instructors should take care to introduce students to some of this material, which is, as Sullivan rightly notes, highly valuable for understanding the dissonance in popular culture over things like the concept of femininity or the construction of gender.
Sullivan believes that this kind of cultural exposé “isn’t simply about giving credit to the enormous accomplishments of sisters during a volatile period of social change. By examining nuns in the context of postwar popular culture, what becomes apparent is the way that the media responds to and establishes conventions for the representation of women’s struggles for equality and independence. As the example of nuns shows, this was not some hermetically sealed system but one that was schizophrenic in its openness to double meanings, to an ambiguous and even contradictory sense of closure, and to the psychic tension of the lead character, who was torn between two competing worlds of nostalgia and progress” (16). One measure of this is the fact that in 1966, only a year after the close of the Second Vatican Council, the number of nuns worldwide reached its peak at 181,421 (43). Clearly something about religious life was attractive to so many women. Yet the changes in convent life that were fueled by Perfectae Caritatis, the Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life, meant that there would be no going back to the days of strict obedience to superiors. Communal and shared governance structures befitting each congregation would soon become the norm. Roles would change as dramatically as the habits of each order or the social options that began to increase for women. In American culture, Betty Freidan’s impact helped give a voice to women’s rights, the National Organization of Women formed, and some nuns, like “Sister Mary Aloysious Schaldenbrand, took even more radical steps by publicly aligning herself with the Planned Parenthood Federation to improve women’s access to birth control” (48). And, not incidentally, the numbers of postulants began to decline. According to Sullivan, “by the seventies women religious were in a no-win situation. They were either too radical for mainstream audiences to appreciate or too conservative to be embraced by radical movements” (58).
Consider, as Sullivan does, that the film portrayals of nuns added little to the more vexing realities women religious faced in carving out their own identity. Could contemporaries identify with Rosalind Russell in Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows? Or Mary Tyler Moore (opposite Elvis!) in Change of Habit? If anything, they damaged the otherwise vital and satisfying profession that they chose to live out faithfully and earnestly. And yet, some did not choose to stay. When it was released in 1959, The Nun’s Story starring Audrey Hepburn explored the limits of convent life. Based upon the novel of the same name, this true story of Louise Heberts, a former Belgian sister, spoke of the courage and humiliation behind one nun’s decision to be released from vowed life. According to Sullivan, all the renewal efforts like the Sister Formation Conference which were set up to improve religious life were suddenly “sideswiped” (98).
If Sullivan is critical of these Hollywood films, she is no less disposed to hold back on vocation booklets or singing nuns. There is a sense that throughout her work, Sullivan is relentless, but fair. I found this to be a thought provoking study that was tightly argued from beginning to end. As such, this penetrating and balanced volume will do well in courses on feminist theology or American Catholic studies. I always wondered why the sisters who taught me couldn’t be more like Sr. Bertrille on TV. Now I know why. Though they are not explored in Sullivan’s book, one wonders how the dominant cultural images typified by Mother Teresa or Mother Angelica are affecting today’s media-savvy youth. Will they warm to the new Corita Kents or Mary Luke Tobins? Will they know the Helen Prejeans? Could they be one?