Grieving June Cleaver

Whiteness and Fifties Nostalgia in Biblical Womanhood Blogging

Suzanne van Geuns

PhD student, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Nostalgia, following Stephanie Coontz and Svetlana Boym, is a response to a threat: people remember the past longingly in contrast with a degenerate present. In religious movements, this past acquires the aura of truth. In the online biblical womanhood movement — consisting of a large network of blogs on authors’ striving towards a ‘biblical’ femininity — the fifties, materially represented by June Cleaver, are remembered as a pre-feminist paradise. This paper argues that bloggers’ fifties nostalgia not only supports their overt rejection of feminism, but also presents a means to envision lived-out biblical truth as deeply white and American.

For Sites of Memory workshop participants — read more (password protected)

With the support of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Pamela Klassen of the University of Toronto and Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer, Director of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, are directing a research project on Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies. The project runs from 2015 to […]

How Should We Understand Indigenous Spirituality (in English)? A reflection on the philosophy of listening Indigenous spirituality matters to Indigenous peoples. In this discussion, I am broadly interested in how Indigenous spirituality is used in contemporary Indigenous politics. More specifically, I ask the question: How should we understand Indigenous spirituality in English? My discussion involves […]