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Redeeming Sexual Difference: Stigmata , The Messenger and Luce Irigaray’s Bleeding Woman

2009; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/jrpc.21.1.004

1703-289X

Luciana Ugrina,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

The 1999 film Stigmata foregrounds the difficulties and hazards involved in representing a woman as a Christ figure, and the necessity of imagining new ways of understanding gendered identity within Christianity. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) similarly confronts the female body in an attempt to reconfigure the relationship between femininity and the sacred. Considering both films alongside the psycholinguistics of Luce Irigaray surfaces the “bleeding woman,” a figure of lack who paradoxically underwrites and secures that which excludes her – a masculine symbolic. Building on Tina Beattie’s assertions that the sacramentality of the female body in orthodox Catholicism is nonexistent – a result, she argues, of an underdeveloped theology of gender and embodiment – I explore if a way beyond the essentialist predicaments of sexed identity in Christianity might be found in Irigaray’s understanding of the divine.