American Sisters Research Articles

RITUALS OF QUEER DIASPORA IN NISHA GANATRA'S CHUTNEY POPCORN1

Nisha Ganatra's stylish Chutney Popcorn (1999) is perhaps the first feature film to focus exclusively on a South Asian American lesbian character as she strives to negotiate a place for herself at the intersection of different communities. The film functions as a text of diasporic queerness and as a rich site for studying the traffic between discourses of diaspora and sexuality. The ethnic diaspora is queered through the physical and emotional journeys of two second‐generation South Asian American sisters – Reena and Sarita – as they struggle to define themselves within and against heterosexist norms and patriarchal diasporic ideologies. The displacement and re‐placement of these characters concludes the film's struggle to present a non‐normative and denaturalized portrait of the ethnic diaspora. The film's project of queering the diaspora is inseparable from its attempt to disrupt a singular and normalized queer subject and constituency, i.e. it seeks to dismantle mainstream hegemonic understandings of queer as white, male or local, diversifying and suggesting contextual multiplicity of queer subjects.

Open Letter to Our African American Sisters and Brothers

The letter was prepared by Elizabeth Martinez (longtime activist, author and director of the Institute for MultiRacial Justice) in consultation with Phil Hutchings (last Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, cofounder of the Institute and currently an Oakland, CA activist.) Comments or questions about the Open Letter are very welcome. Send comments or suggestions to the Institute in San Francisco at i4mrj@aol. com.

Charity Alive: Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Halifax, 1950-1980 by Sister Mary Olga McKenna

BOOK REVIEWS487 of Bishop Sheen is deserving of a more serious scholarly study—a fascinating story remaining to be told. Kathleen L. Riley Ohio Dominican College Canadian CharityAlive: Sisters ofCharity ofSaint Vincent de Paul, Halifax, 1950-1980. By Sister Mary Olga McKenna. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc. 1998. Pp. xxvi,376. $54.00.) In her preface to CharityAlive, Mary Olga McKenna notes that her study continues from the period covered in an earlier work which recounted one hundred years of institutional expansion from the 1849 Halifax founding to 1949. McKenna's work focuses on the following thirty years: the renewal experience. While acknowledging the benefits of renewal to the sisters who remained in the community, Charity Alive also contains a sensitive portrayal of the institutional and personal turmoil wrought by the decline in membership and the divestiture of houses and traditional ministries experienced by the Sisters of Charity, Halifax. As such, this book is at times refreshingly candid. The major challenges facing the community during the years of renewal—authority , governance, ministry, lifestyle—are described and analyzed through the administrative terms of Mother SteUa Maria Reiser (1950-1962), Mother Irene Farmer (1962-1972), and Sister Katherine O'Toole (1972-1980). Mother Reiser and the community moved, in response to papal directives, toward decentralization by establishing five provinces within the congregation by the mid1950 's: three Canadian and two American. As renewal accelerated, Mother Irene Farmer and her councfl appeared to bear the brunt of the initial shocks of renewal,including the eruption of the nationaUty issue. Although a Sister Formation Center had been established in 1961 in Halifax, CouncU responded affirmatively to a proposal from the Boston and New York provinces who wished to secure greater autonomy by having a Sister Formation Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for the American sisters. McKenna notes that Mother Farmer's goal throughout her term was to preserve the unity and continuity of the community. Historically, the congregation drew its members from Canada and the United States, and more than two-thirds of its foundations were in Canada. However, nationality may have been a smouldering issue within the congregation. In the Chapter of 1968, which re-elected Mother Farmer, the governing council would now include two new categories: a Canadian coordinator and an American coordinator . The governance committee had suggested these to "reconcUe 488BOOK REVIEWS perceived tensions between the American and Canadian membership. . . ." McKenna does not explore the nature of these tensions. Did the Americans feel that their views were being underrepresented in a Canadian-based congregation ? Did the Canadians look at the leadership structure and wonder if too many Americans were in pivotal positions? Mother Reiser and Sister O'Toole were from Massachusetts as was Sister Catherine Wallace, the first director of studies at the Sister Formation Center in Halifax. By 1972, with the election of Sister Katherine O'Toole, only thirty-seven when she assumed office, the formation houses were being converted into retirement centers—a consequence of the fuU impact of declining vocations and withdrawals of some of the community's best-educated women. McKenna concludes by reminding us that modification of the ". . . structures, customs and habits led to a period of breakdown and conflict . . ." and perhaps most poignantly, "aloneness." She writes that while the dignity of the individual person was the main guideline in the movement toward the appropriate renewal of reUgious life, insufficient thought was given to the consequences of dismantling the traditional system. She notes too that "... until Vatican II, women religious were perhaps the most dependable but at the same time the most expendable resources in the Church. . . ." One might conclude from reading Charity Alive, that in view of the limited planning given to the specifics of renewal within the larger Church, the expendability of women religious continued after Vatican Council II. McKenna seems to suggest that during the renewal of reUgious life more could, or should, have been salvaged from a world we may have lost. Elizabeth W McGahan University ofNew Brunswick—SaintJohn Campus Latin American Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico . By Amos Megged. [Cultures, Beliefs, and Traditions: Medieval and Early Modern Peoples,Volume 2.] (Leiden and NewYork: E.J...

Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns by George C. Stewart, Jr.

Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns by George C. Stewart, Jr.

Sisters at Work

This article examines occupational differentiation of American Catholic sisters both prior to and following the Second Vatican Council. The pre- Vatican II era is characterized in terms of mechanical solidarity such that a common group identity and culture based on work is shared. By contrast, apostolic sisters of the post-Vatican II period seem to exemplify the concept of organic solidarity; there is more variation with regard to occupations and life-style. The analysis focuses on the life histories of sisters residing in South Texas. In particular, the analysis relates the diversification in their careers to changes in their ideology and lifestyle, and the changing demographic and financial status of their congregations. We suggest that the diversification of occupational choices among sisters parallels that of working women more generally.

Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics.

This excellent book left me with ambivalent feelings. The women in the Nordic countries have progressed beyond their North American sisters in numerous aspects, but continue to suffer from much of the same discrimination and oppression. The early Canadian feminists believed gaining the rights to vote and to hold elected office would have far-reaching social benefits for women. Many of their expectations went unfulfilled. in the Nordic countries feel disappointment as well. Nonetheless, they have achieved much that we can envy and attempt to emulate. This valuable book is a collaboration by twenty Nordic women scholars studying political problems and issues involving women. It grew out of the Women in Politics working group in Berlin, in 1977. The eight well-researched chapters address such issues as women in organizations, elections, parliament and the corporate systems, as they vary from country to country. In addition they contemplate the questions of equality and the position of women in today's Nordic societies. They reach a sobering conclusion:

Sisters across the sea: Early Norwegian feminists and their American connections

The organized feminist movement in Norway post-dated the American movement by almost 40 years. During the pre-organizational stage, intriguing descriptions of American women and their social conditions were received in Norway. A number of dynamic Norwegian women were motivated to emigrate to the more compatible New World environment. After the formation of the Norwegian Feminist Society in 1884 and the launching of its journal Nylaende in 1887, Norwegian feminist enjoyed direct and frequent contact with the American movement. Nylaende developed a following among Norwegian-American women, who themselves served as an important cross-cultural link. American feminism had a practical, psychological, and even symbolic impact upon Norwegian feminists, as they developed their priorities and tested their wings. In particular, the American movement provided valuable role models. The Norwegians followed with great interest the entrance of American women into diverse occupations and the American struggle to win the vote. When Norwegian women obtained the right to vote in national elections (1907 with restrictions; 1913 full suffrage), they reciprocated with support and a positive example for their American sisters. The Norwegian and American movements displayed not only a sense of shared mission; they provided mutual encouragement and support.

The New Feminist Criticism

sociate, it beareth no sway, it possesseth nothing during coverture. A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert, in Latin, nupta, that is veiled, as it were, clouded and overshadowed, she has lost her streame.... To a married woman, her new self is her superior, her companion, her master.' Is it a fear of losing one's psychic streame, one's unique identity as a human being, that is working deep in the bone of Clarissa Harlowe, Sue Bridehead, Maggie Tulliver, Mrs. Ramsay, Anna Wulf and their American sisters, and can a comprehension of this malaise help or hinder our understanding of the literature by and about women? It is hardly surprising that there is emerging a new feminist criticism to approach such questions. Its pitfalls are so immediately obvious that it seems imperative to consider as dispassionately as possible a typical field that such criticism might survey, the strictures it should impose upon itself and its principal modes of attack. In fiction the field would range from feminist literature narrowly defined as works in which the author's explicit intention is to expose some aspect of sexism, to feminine literature broadly defined as by and about women. At the narrow end of the spectrum we have novels, for example, which probe into woman's situation in the same manner that Steinbeck examined the

Mathematics and the Struggle for Black Liberation

wage a successful struggle against the American racist-capitalist system brothers and sisters need not only black people's support, we also need (among many other things) scientific analysis and scientific skills. Black people in the U.S. are not the peasants and workers of an underdeveloped tropical country. Rather, we are a people enslaved in deteriorating rural and urban regions filled with mechanized farms and industries, drugs, poverty, welfare programs and the unemployed within the world's most scientifically advanced and economically overdeveloped nation. Our scientific analysis, strategies and tactics and skills supporting our revolutionary struggle to seize, control and humanistically change America must be realized in the context of 20th and 21st

The Relations of Central and South America With the United States as Affected By the European War

The political relations of the United States with the countries of Central and South America have undoubtedly been modified by reason of the European war. This appears from the expression of opinions formed by the people of Latin America, with relation to the civilized countries of Europe, now at war, which only yesterday were criticising the political turmoils of some of the countries of this hemisphere and clamoring in the name of civilization and humanity for the intervention of some of the stronger republics in the affairs of their weaker sisters. It suffices to say that the spirit of solidarity and good will among the Latin American nations is markedly stronger and a growing intimacy between these countries and the United States is now apparent. Meanwhile, everything seems to tend to the formation of a more complete union for the defense of the common interest of the nations of this We may say confidently that if tomorrow the United States were to be involved in a foreign conflict, the United States would not be alone for its Latin American sisters would, in my opinion, demonstrate that the territory of this continent cannot be attacked with impunity, and would manifest in no uncertain fashion their interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, -America, the continent, for the Americans of the continent. Nevertheless, it must ever be borne in mind that in order to foster the growing confidence of the Latin American republics, it is necessary that this great nation should take no backward step, but 66