It's Mayfest at our college. (Yes, we have May in April, even though this is northern Minnesota. By the time we actually reach May, it's Finals Week.)
One part of Mayfest is the Reif Run, a 5k event for students, faculty, and staff. There are winners - but the ethos is simply to enjoy running through the college's neighborhood on a beautiful spring day. This year was the 30th Reif Run, a landmark.
Although I didn't see the run (my class is scheduled right through it), I did see the t-shirt, and it brought me to a standstill. No, it wasn't the neon-green color.
It was the plump little nuns in full habits jogging along a little path.
There is not a single sister in this monastery who wears such garb, and only a very few who wear modified habits. On a campus where most students have at least one sister for a teacher at some point in time - and they see us all over the campus - they nonetheless trot out a worn and offensive stereotype. It never occurs to them that mocking nuns in traditional garb is, in essence, mocking the charism of the sisters who sponsor their college.
Someone will surely think I'm simply humorless and don't get the joke. Perhaps. But imagine the reaction if the t-shirts portrayed, oh, women in the hajib or burka running along a path and crossing the finish line? Hmong people pulling rickshaws along a race course? Scrawny pale thin young men with curly sidelocks and yarmulkes? Mocking drawings of people with disabilites? Native Americans with feathers in their hair? There would be an uproar - and everyone knows it. That's why we don't see t-shirts like that.
I'm not sure where or how the genre of cute nun-pics got its start. (And there are the even more offensive versions, the sexy nun-pics). Their effect is like that of every other stereotype: to depersonalize the targeted group. It is truly sad when an institution portrays its founding sponsors that way.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Why are there nun-pics on that t-shirt?
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11 comments:
I hope I can understand why you are offended by this. Yes, this is a very tired old joke (I haven't see a nun in an unmodified habit in over 15 years, since I moved away from NYC), but I personally don't see why it inspires anything more than a roll of the eyes. I truly hope I am not offending you by asking this question - I do want to understand which sensibilities are hurt by seeing this t-shirt. Thank you.
I'm not offended - in fact, I almost didn't write the post because it seemed likely that many people would think there wasn't a problem.
Pictures like this are dealing in a stereotype, in this case of what women in religious life are about. The pictures of nuns in full habits often have them look naive, chubby-clumsy, and as though they are encountering the "real" world for the first time.
It's an image that dismisses religious as intelligent, competent people who can participate and be effective in the "real" world. It strikes me as a version of Aunt Jemima or the "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" image that plagued airline stewardesses until they became flight attendants.
I don't much care for, oh, the post cards that show nuns at a baseball game as cute, but they were at least made by some anonymous corporation. The Nunzilla dolls and boxing nun puppet are another example of negative stereotyping. Folks think they know what category one belongs in as soon as they meet us: we belong with the boxing nunzillas who are clueless but given to temper outbursts. It's an uphill battle to have a working relationship as a real person starting from that stereotype.
I was particularly unhappy to see the people who work alongside us everyday use this stereotype. It's not based on anything we actually do.
I'm probably feeling it more because this is the most recent of several such incidents on campus. For a while there was a photo circulating of a group of 10 nuns (full habits) carrying rifles, with a caption stating that suicide bombers were going to be surprised at the 10 virgins they would meet in heaven. When we had a discussion with some students, many of them thought that Muslims might be offended (although the text did not mention Islam) but no one thought that Catholics or sisters were being mocked by being presented as (bad) trophies to suicide bombers.
I don't know if I'm doing a good job of expressing my reaction to these photos and statements. I do know that most sisters I know have pretty much the same feeling about them - and (like women in before the women's movement of the 1970s) usually don't feel as though we'll be heard or understood if we say something.
I figure it's always worth a discussion.
You are right about many people would not think there was a problem with the T-shirt. I don't understand the comment from bookartist about " I haven't see a nun in an unmodified habit in 15 years...".
I don't care how a woman is dressed, but to portray them as naive, chubby-clumsy etc., is just not right. I think you are right to discuss it.
I really think a discussion on this is very appropriate . Any time a stereotype is shuffled out of the deck of cards and put on the table publicly, I think a discussion is appropriate. And at an event involving the school, it's really appropriate. Choices result in feedback and sometimes that's just how we have to learn awareness, the necessity of practicing discernment and how to make better choices.
What bothers me when people differentiate between the degree of harm of using stereotypes for one group, yet feel in another group it's not an issue, is that the use of stereotypes is condoned. This is far too often used to excuse stereotyping of groups that are somehow seen as not the "in" groups to be protected or something.
Stereotypes make life very difficult and really can limit the ways in which we interact.
I think what you wrote both in the post and in the comments was well said!
Sister, why is this such a hot button for you.? I respect your feelings, but I dont understand them.
Smile-lighten up-life is short.
(at least mine is. I would be wasting the days-weeks left to spend my economy of energy on allowing myself to become offended.
BARBARA
Thank you so much for your reply. I think I misunderstood what you expressed in your original post.
And if I may address djc: I only meant to express that this is a very old joke, and because nuns very rarely wear unmodified habits nowadays, it's a barely relevant one, too.
I think there's an area somewhere between "hot button" and "it doesn't matter at all" - and that's the area I'm trying to strike.
In that area, we notice that the way we picture or speak about groups convey images and stereotypes that may be helpful or hurtful. A mindful way of living encourages us to notice and avoid the harmful, while seeking out and promoting the helpful.
This was an instance of noticing the harmful, and calling attention to the dynamic by which its harm is not noticed or is discredited.
I may well have missed that nuanced mark.
Most people are intelligent enough to distinguish between "real" nuns and stereotypes. Images of nuns in traditional habits, like it or not, are part of popular culture and our shared Catholic cultural inheritence, and in both of these can be found good natured humor re: habits. Our local nuns back in the 60's treated their newly cast-off traditional habits like a joke. Much more disrespectful in my eyes.
I respect nuns who wear secular garb or modified habits. I also respect nuns who wear traditional habits. To be upset because Catholic students depicted nuns in traditonal habits, jogging, (on a T shirt for crying out loud) makes no sense to me. The students no doubt did this in fun and with affection, not with malice. If you acuse them of being thoughtless and of stereotyping, then you too are somewhat guilty of doing the same, are you not?
Nuns have spent years trying to get lay people to understand how relatively unimportant habits are to one's being a nun. And you're upset because you believe (erroneously I think) that disrespect has been shown to them?
How sad that those of us Religious in progressive communities (Episcopal in my case) who have chosen to retain the traditional habit are thought by our non-habited Brothers and Sisters to be in your words...
" It's an image that dismisses religious as intelligent, competent people who can participate and be effective in the "real" world. It strikes me as a version of Aunt Jemima or the "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" image that plagued airline stewardesses until they became flight attendants."
Would you say the same, I wonder, of modern Buddhist monks and nuns who wear religious garb? The Dalai Lama?
Clothes send powerful psychological images both to the wearer and the observer. Are you also opposed to vestments, priests in clericals, medical personell in lab coats,...?
P.S. Flight Attendants of both sexes still wear a uniforms.
It seems I did not communicate clearly.
I don't object to the least that religious wear habits. I object strongly to images that make fun of people who wear habits.
In this situation, the t-shirts chosen for an event use an image of nuns in habits that continues a negative stereotype: dumpy, cute, and grinning like idiots. The choice of such an image is a double dis-service: on the one hand, to the meaning and solemnity of the habit in orders that do wear them, and on the other hand, to the sisters whose charism is the foundation of the institution they attend.
I apologize, Brother Christopher, that my criticism of a stylized and stereotypical image came across to you as a criticism of the habit itself. As people often say, "some of my best friends wear habits."
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