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Rebecca J. Lester

URL: http://news-info.wustl.edu/sb/page/normal/512.html

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Neil Schoenherr
News Writer; Assoc. Record Editor
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(314) 935-5235

Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology in Arts and Sciences

Expertise: medical anthropology, gender embodiment, religion and ritual, psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychiatry, Mexico, United States

Bio:
Rebecca Lester
Rebecca Lester
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Lester's research focuses on medical anthropology, gender, embodiment, religion and ritual, psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry. Linking these issues at various points is her focus on gender, self and the body. She has recently completed her first book (based on her dissertation research): an ethnography of subjective transformation through the systematic alteration of the experience of embodiment in the context of a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico. She examines the ways in which the Sisters' existential transformation proceeds in direct, practical engagement with larger cultural concerns about Mexican nationalism and cultural identity in the face of an accelerated movement into the "first world." In examining this process, the book, Jesus in Our Wombs, is an exploration in the ways in which gendered subjectivities may become politically and socially charged as means of articulating cultural conflicts about modernity and how these larger meanings take on significance for people on the most intimate of personal levels. Lester's interest in the religious experiences of women in the convent grew out of her previous (and ongoing) research on anorexia nervosa. She is particularly interested in anorexia as a contemporary ascetic practice, the way in which anorexia as an illness is defined and constructed within medical discourse, and how this, in turn, shapes the anorexic woman's subjective experience of her distress. Specifically, she interrogates the cultural dimensions of the illness as one in which particular, moralized forms of body ritual assume center stage. She also conducted research on the Lower East Side of New York City as part of a three-year, three-city project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation evaluating urgent questions of welfare, work, and identity among formerly homeless mentally ill individuals. Her particular focus was on questions of the cultural constructions of "mental illness" and "recovery" as projects of spiritual and moral regeneration. Lester's current research explores the embodied terrains of sexuality and desire in the anorexic condition. This project assesses the ways in which linkages among morality, sexual identity, and food and body concerns are elaborated in the diagnosis and management of this illness in both the clinical and non-clinical (e.g., twelve-step groups) domains. She is particularly interested in the mobilization of spiritual or religious discourses in these contexts as a means of articulating and persuading suffers to accept "permissible" experiences of the body.

WUSTL Contact Information:
Work:(314) 935-9426
Fax:(314) 935-8535
E-mail:rjlester@wustl.edu
Address:Campus Box 9426
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63105

Education:


News Stories & Tip Sheets:

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'Becoming brides of Christ'

Book examines life of young nuns (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/4805.html)

April 8, 2005 --
A sociocultural anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis spent 18 months in a Mexican convent in an attempt to understand young women's motivations for leaving their homes, friends, school and independence to become a nun. Rebecca J. Lester, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, was also interested in understanding "what goes on emotionally, psychologically and spiritually with these women as they try to decide if they should pledge themselves eternally to Christ and the church." Lester found while doing her fieldwork at the convent from 1994-95 that the more interesting question was "what kept these women there, day after day?" In her new book, "Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent," released April 5, Lester sets out to explain the force of "the call."



Showing 1 Stories.

Related Information


Related Links:
•Department of Anthropology Web site (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro)
•Lester's Web page (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/blurb/b_lester.html)

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