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

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.