num_pages: 358
description: In Jesus in Our Wombs Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives training and experiences of a group of postulantsyoung women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts fears ambitions and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written finely textured and theoretically rigorous this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity.Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an authentic femininityone that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of the Calland their choices in answering itas politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities family backgrounds friendships and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's technology of embodiment on multiple levelsfrom the phenomenological to the political.
language: English
title: Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Volume 5)
publisher: University of California Press