Rihanna’s religious imagery is a protest against feminine ideals of respectability and decency

Rihanna’s no stranger to inflicting a stir. This time, she’s attracted controversy and outrage together with her “dehumanising and degrading” illustration of a nun for the Spring 2024 cowl of Interview journal.

This isn’t Rihanna’s first use of non secular imagery in her work, both. Take her “attractive pope” outfit on the 2018 Met Gala, for instance. It grew to become an iconic look, since immortalised in a Madame Tussard’s wax work, that impressed Vogue journal to declare “Rihanna received the Met Gala”.

Like the duvet picture for Interview journal, some quarters deemed the Gala theme “heavenly our bodies: vogue and the catholic creativeness” “sacrilegious”.

However the catholic church partnered with the accompanying Metropolitan Museum of Artwork exhibition, lending greater than forty papal vestments from the Vatican. The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, not solely sanctioned but in addition attended the occasion.

Rihanna hasn’t restricted her use of non secular symbolism to Christianity, both. In 2021, she was accused of cultural appropriation when she photographed carrying a pendant of the Hindu deity Ganesha.

And the yr earlier than, Rihanna apologised for utilizing sacred Islamic textual content within the music for the 2020 Savage x Fenty lingerie runway present.

Non secular symbolism as cultural provocation

Like many excessive profile pop stars from Beyoncé to Madonna and Girl Gaga to Lil Nas X, Rihanna makes use of spiritual imagery as cultural provocation.

Simply as Beyoncé used Virgin Mary imagery in her being pregnant bulletins to subvert associations between whiteness and sexual purity, Rihanna parodies the “nunsploitation” style to play with assumptions concerning the politics of respectability and style, sexual abstinence and the sexualisation of girls.

Rihanna’s nun-themed look has sparked outcry as a result of it betrays cultural concepts about how ladies ought to costume. Non secular imagery is her device for utilizing playful parody to push again on spiritual beliefs about ladies’s our bodies.

Christianity has lengthy held notions about ladies’s costume. There are a variety of biblical texts which proscribe modesty for ladies, together with 1 Timothy 2:9-10, “I additionally need ladies to decorate modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly garments.”

Codes of costume stay in drive in numerous Christian denominations in the present day.

Nuns as widespread cultural trope

The appropriation of the determine of the nun is deeply embedded in widespread tradition, together with cinematic portrayals of musical nuns in a lot cherished basic movies akin to The Sound of Music and Sister Act.

Within the widespread creativeness, nuns are disciplined, modest, humble, silent – and sexually abstinent. In such movies, viewers’ curiosity lies in how these nuns, the important thing actors in vibrant plots, subvert expectations of their humble, seemingly passive existences.

Common tradition’s nun obsession sparks each curiosity and outrage as a result of it challenges orthodoxy. And it isn’t simply spiritual orthodoxy that’s challenged – it’s additionally social expectations of girls and cultural assumptions about their our bodies. The identical anxieties and issues aren’t shared about monks or monks, as an illustration.

Typically portrayed as unattainable or celibate, monks could be offered as “scorching” in popular culture with out the identical stage of public outrage as comparable representations of non secular ladies.

Nuns provoke anxiousness as a result of they’re ladies who exist with out males. The sexualisation of nuns outcomes from the perceived rupture of notions of abstinence and purity, typically related to those that have undertaken spiritual orders.

It’s straightforward – however reductive – to say that this imagery is solely an affordable try to draw consideration and courtroom controversy. Sure, the pictures have executed precisely that, for all of the celebrities listed above too.

Non secular symbolism can be an necessary approach of elevating questions and dialogue about urgent cultural points from the relevance of organised faith to social attitudes to ladies, particularly ladies of color. Rihanna’s eroticised nun imagery, then, capabilities as a protest in opposition to female beliefs of modesty and decency.

Maternal breast is greatest

For instance, on the Interview journal cowl, Rihanna partially exposes her breast. Uncovered breasts in spiritual artwork haven’t prompted controversy, particularly within the case of the Virgin Mary. There’s a celebrated assortment of icons “virgo lactans” or “nursing Madonnas” wherein Mary is nursing the newborn Jesus.

Right here, the naked breast doesn’t provoke outrage as a result of it’s maternally focussed – the Mary feeding the newborn Jesus – and the mom is a virgin.

Faith has a big position to play in up to date tradition. In spite of everything, whereas these symbols and iconography could have their roots in spiritual traditions, they’re additionally cultural merchandise. Non secular symbols and concepts are culturally embedded, a lot in order that push again in opposition to Rihanna – and different celebrities adopting spiritual imagery – is a symptom of the anxiousness that Christianity is shedding management over its symbols.

It’s telling, then, {that a} lady’s selection to precise herself, her sexuality and take management of the presentation of her physique is taken into account harmful and blasphemous. This response to Rihanna’s Interview cowl reveals far more about social and cultural attitudes to ladies and their our bodies than it does about Rihanna’s unhealthy habits.