What question did this study set out to answer?

The research aims to reinterpret the Ephrata Cloister using feminist, queer, and trans theories to highlight alternative gender and kinship forms.

February 5, 2026

Sisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata's Celibate Sisterhood

Key Points

The research aims to reinterpret the Ephrata Cloister using feminist, queer, and trans theories to highlight alternative gender and kinship forms.
Analysis of Ephrata Cloister archives
Application of feminist and queer theoretical frameworks
Examination of religious practices and domestic economy
Alternative forms of relationality and gender identified within the Sisterhood
Religious practices challenged traditional frameworks of womanhood
Concepts of androgyny revealed in the Sisterhood's theology

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.

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Cite This Study

Anca Wilkening (Thu,) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/698435b9f1d9ada3c1fb4ebd https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2026.a981545

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