Female Catholic authors as product and producer of 'Catholic femininity'?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Seiler
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321149282

Catholicism’s neo-ultramontane and anti-modernist phase (around the middle of the 19th and middle of the 20th century) was characterised by normative Catholic attributions of femininity, through which the pluralisation dynamics of that decade remained largely hidden. Inertia, change and (un)simultaneous emancipatory conceptions regarding Catholic gender norms will be reconstructed along church-historical lines based on biographical sources and literary works by female Catholic authors. In contrast to women active in the Catholic associations, these writers, as representatives of an independent profession, strove through their works to elicit a public effect among their readership. In this way, they became actors in the field of literary Catholicism. The image that Catholic female writers drew of “femininity” and the correlation of this image with their historical-biographical self-understanding as they adapted, modified and overcame Catholic gender norms has been researched in-depth without succumbing to a “biographical circular argument” (S. Nieberle). In this way, the expansion of Catholic research along gender history lines is being made possible through the analysis of a further research desideratum.In a triple-layered analysis, “Catholic femininity” (and, indirectly, “Catholic masculinity”) are examined through the lives and works of Catholic female authors. (1) The evaluation of the biographical benchmarks of this collective reveals the extent to which it is, in itself, a kind of typological “product” of normative Catholic attributions of femininity. (2) The evaluation of central works of prose with complex links to reality (novels, narratives, short stories) reveals the extent to which the female authors reflected “Catholic femininity” either in correspondence with or in rejection of their own life plans and “produced” it in their fictional literary figures or in self-stylization. In addition, autobiographical works are included in this analysis. (3) The evaluation of ego-documents (diaries and letters) reveals to what extent discrepancies appear in their subjective appropriation.The relational database on the female Catholic authors that was developed in interdisciplinary cooperation with modern church history, Catholic studies, German studies and computer science will be made available for subsequent use.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants