Sisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata's Celibate Sisterhood
Abstract
Abstract: This study offers a new interpretation of the Ephrata Cloister, a celibate Christian community in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, through feminist, queer, and trans studies. Read through these theoretical lenses, the cloister's seldom-studied archives reveal how the Ephrata Sisterhood constructed alternative forms of relationality and gender. The Sisters' religious practices, domestic economy, and theology that imagined a return to an original androgynous humanity destabilized conventional colonial frameworks of womanhood and kinship in early North America.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Religion
Gender
and Enlightenment
Gender and Feminist Studies
Early Modern Women Writers
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Volume
- 59
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 217–232
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026
- Language
- EN