9.
Women and the Missionary Position?
Gendering Encounters with the Ethnic Other
in Quaker and Catholic Writings

Organizers:

• Sylvia Brown, English, University of Alberta
• Paulomi Chakraborty, English, University of Alberta
• Karine Hopper, English, University of Alberta
• Kelly Laycock, English, University of Alberta
• Aida Patient, English, University of Alberta
• Kirsten Uszkalo, English, University of Alberta
  

Description:


(I) 20 MINUTES FOR PRELIMINARIES

We will spend the first 10 minutes of preliminaries briefly introducing ourselves (we originate in a graduate seminar at the University of Alberta) and our general, structuring concerns, questions, and assumptions. We'll also use part of the first 10 minutes to organize workshop participants into three smaller discussion groups. Each breakout group will be moderated by a team of two workshop conveners.

Once the breakout groups are organized, the remaining 10 minutes of preliminaries will be used by the breakout-group moderators to introduce the more specific questions and texts proposed for discussion in the small group. Basically, each breakout group will be dedicated to one of our women missionaries: Blaugdone, Fisher, and Marie de l'Incarnation. We will give workshop participants the opportunity to choose their missionary/breakout group, but will aim to negotiate with workshop participants for three roughly equal discussion groups.

(II) 40 MINUTES FOR DISCUSSION IN SMALL GROUPS

Sample Preliminary questions for the Barbara Blaugdone group

• In what ways is Blaugdone physically and spiritually othered by people “of her own nation”?
• How does Blaugdone's horror at being aligned with gypsies and vagabonds reflect upon her position as Quaker missionary?
• Does Blaugdone resist or invite a conflation of the national and religious identities of the Irish?
• Does Blaugdone record gender playing a role in her travels, reception and linguistic style? How are we to read the sexualized violence she so often encounters?
• How do the repeated accusations of witchcraft deconstruct her Christian/Quaker missionary position?

Sample Preliminary questions for the Mary Fisher group

• How does Fisher's own gender, ethnic, and class identity (she was a Northern servingwoman) support her decision to travel?
• How do her own accounts of her travels (from letters written "home") compare with George Bishop's account of her encounter with the Sultan? What agendas – different or overlapping – do both accounts serve?
• What ideological and political use does Bishop make of Quaker travels and encounters with the ethnic Other, in Fisher's case and more generally in New England Judged?
• What are we to make of the fact that Fisher ended her life owning a black slave?

Sample Preliminary questions for the Marie de L'Incarnation group

• Marie de L’Incarnation left her son when he was a child in order to fulfill her spiritual calling. In New France, Marie became a highly involved spiritual 'mother' to her native american charges at the mission school. In what ways might maternity mediate her relationships with her spiritual and temporal children in her old and new homelands? Is this relationship necessarily a problematic one?
• Marie taught her native students French and learned to speak and write in native languages herself. To what degree might her sense of herself as a woman actively involved with language (as a writer and teacher) shape both her own identity as well as her representations of the ethnic 'Other'?'
• In what ways are Marie's own gender, ethnic, and class identity challenged, redefined or reconfirmed through her encounters with the female, 'savage' Other? How might these factors play into Marie's choice to stay in New France until her death in 1672?
• How do Marie’s writings about the natives of New France compare to more 'official' reports on New France written by the (male) Jesuits?

Some questions for all groups to consider

• In what ways might the differing notions of women's spiritual roles within Protestantism, Quakerism and Catholicism shape these texts and the encounters narrated within them? Is there a difference to be examined?
• Does the millenarian theology of Quakers work to erase difference, to uphold it, or both?
• Does proximity to, or distance from, home affect the missionary's position? That is, do the factors of shared language and culture, ease of travel and return, make a difference?
• How adequate are the models of postcolonial theorists (whose framework is often exclusively post-1800) for the analysis of early modern missionaries and texts? What are the differences between "modern" imperialism and early modern missionary enterprises?
• How can we introduce "religion" as a category of analysis (which comes into being alongside the more familiar interdependent categories of ethnicity, nation, gender, class)? What are we to make of the fact that "ethnic" meant "pagan" in early modern usage? Is it possible to historicize the term "ethnic," in order to recover the religious, and especially millenarian, agendas behind the historical mapping of racial or ethnic difference?

TRANSITION/COMMUNICATION FROM THE SMALL GROUPS TO THE LARGE GROUP

Each small group will decide on a secretary who will be responsible for the initial communication of the most important points/questions arising from discussion, to be summarized for the larger group. Depending on what's available in our meeting room, the summary and communication will probably take the form of writing points and questions on a white or blackboard at the front of the room. This should happen in the last five minutes of time dedicated to discussion in small groups.

(III) 30 MINUTES FOR CONSOLIDATION/RETURN TO DISCUSSION IN LARGE GROUP

We will once again form one large group in order to compare and discuss our findings in the small groups. This part of the discussion will highlight what discoveries can be made from comparison.

Suggested readings:

Primary Texts [total 9 pp.]

• Excerpts from Barbara Blaugdone, An Account of the Travels, Suffering and Persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone (1691). [3 pps.]
• Excerpts from George Bishop's New England Judged (1661), including Mary Fisher's travels, short extracts from her letters (transcribed from the Friends' Library, London). [3 pp.]
• Extracts from the Letters of Marie de L'Incarnation [2 pp.]; from the Relation (1654), Marie de L'Incarnation's spiritual autobiography [½ p.]; and from the Jesuit Relations [½ p.]

Critical, Historiographical, and Theoretical Contexts [total 6 pp.]

• Short extracts from the following, as critical and historiographical context for encounters with ethnic others: Philip D. Morgan, in “Encounters between British and ‘indigenous’ peoples, c. 1500- c. 1800,” Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, eds. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia, U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Louis Montrose, in “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991); A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). [3 pps.]
• Extracts from postcolonial theorists, including Edward Said on the discourse of Otherness (from Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism) and Anne McClintock on how the discourses of gender, race, and empire-building are constituted in each other (from Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Contest). [3 pp.]