Sister Acts: Why Nuns Are Showing Up Everywhere

What’s familiar and what’s new about our current fascination with the figure and the mystery of the nun, from Rosalía to self-help books.

By Alexandra VeriniJanuary 28, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Cultural Studies

• Gender & Sexuality

NUNS ARE HAVING a moment. This past September, three elderly Austrian Augustinian sisters made global headlines for defying the Archdiocese of Salzburg by escaping from a nursing home to return to their abandoned convent in the Alps. In what many jokingly referred to as “Nunvember,” Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía donned a white habit for the cover of her critically acclaimed album Lux, some songs from which were inspired by stories of female Catholic saints. Those songs and others appeared in the background of #NunTok social media posts, which showcase Catholic nuns dancing and playing pranks. Much as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993) transforms a struggling high school choir by infusing their performances with hip-hop and R & B, the once-fusty image of the nun has become trendy. In a surprising twist, feminist and queer audiences, so often targets of church patriarchy, are claiming Catholic nuns as their own, mobilizing these multivalent icons of faith as vehicles for self-determination and even sexual autonomy.

Those uninitiated in “nunmania” might wonder why religious sisters are taking center stage. While media coverage of this trend makes it out to be a recent phenomenon, fascination with nuns is nothing new. Women who opt for the convent over the marriage market have long served as targets of anti-Catholic critique and, more recently, as representatives of girl power and sites for exploring women’s sexuality. Drawing from the secular critique of the time, early works of fiction about nuns from the Enlightenment often portray the vow to devote one’s life to prayer and chastity as inherently oppressive. Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) and Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (1796) represented the cloister as a place of unnatural constraint. Taking a different tack, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796) titillated readers by casting the convent as a den of lascivious desire and a hotbed of Catholic hypocrisy and corruption. Escaped-nun memoirs like Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836) added fuel to the anti-Catholic fire by portraying nunneries as no better than prisons.

The 20th century produced more redemptive portrayals of convent life, emphasizing active service and opportunities for women’s autonomy. Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus (1939), for instance, depicts a group of well-meaning if misguided nuns who set up a school in the Himalayas. This novel was adapted into a popular film starring Deborah Kerr in 1947, which, alongside others like The Nun’s Story (1959) with Audrey Hepburn, offered more nuanced portrayals of religious life in which women took their vocation seriously and sometimes did some good. Later in the century, the musical Sister Act (1992) cheered audiences with the tale of a dreary San Francisco convent brought back to life by a lounge singer from Reno, Nevada, who takes refuge there under witness protection (Whoopi Goldberg), to the chagrin of the imposing Reverend Mother (Maggie Smith). The formula worked so well that Hollywood saw fit for a second outing with Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, this time charging the now-iconic Sister Mary Clarence to lift the spirits and fortunes of a struggling Catholic school, proving to the students and the audience that a convent could be as cool as any nightclub.

Alongside these PG versions of Catholic sisterhood, audiences have also flocked to movies that play with the idea of the sexy veiled and sometimes violent woman. Again, this is nothing new. In The Decameron (ca. 1348–53), Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about lusty nuns who seduce and manipulate lovers, stories upon which the 2017 comedy The Little Hours is loosely based. This use of the nun to interrogate women’s sexuality recurs in the “nunsploitation” films of the 1970s. Movies like Our Lady of Lust (1972) and The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine (1974) portray cloistered women with ravenous sexual appetites, even dabbling in demonic possession, a claim historically used during the Inquisition to subjugate women who claimed to have religious visions. Killer Nun (1979) trafficked in similar stereotypes of feminine religious madness as Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg), the head nurse of a general hospital, experiences drug-induced hallucinations and goes on a killing spree. More recently, The Nun (2018), a spinoff of the horror series The Conjuring, portrays sisters in a Romanian cloister besieged by a demon who takes the form of a nun before being vanquished by a novitiate. These films trade on the arcane mystery of the Catholic Church to explore the twinned taboos of female sexual desire and violence, mobilizing them to develop a different kind of final girl.

Despite the historic and enduring homophobia of the Catholic Church, the figure of the nun has also served as a surprising model for queer activism. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in San Francisco in 1979, are a group of predominantly gay men (though they include all genders and sexualities) who perform in drag habits to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. With the self-proclaimed mission of “promulgating universal joy and expiating stigmatic guilt,” the SPI takes the call to service seriously and engages in diverse forms of community support, from AIDS research fundraising to safer-sex education.

Yet while cultural fascination with Catholic nuns might not be new, today’s frenzy has its own particular edge. We’ve moved away from fixation on loss of autonomy and titillating taboos toward a view of the convent as a trendy site of female empowerment. To some degree, this interest in female monasticism may reflect a real-life resurgence of women’s entry into religious life and a revival of Catholicism in unexpected places, like New York’s hip Dimes Square, but the current explosion of nuns in pop culture is about more than a return to the faith. In a post-Dobbs world, one in which women’s rights are being eroded everywhere from Afghanistan to the United States and women are routinely trolled in online spaces, the idea of the convent offers a sanctuary from the male gaze that seeks to dominate women’s bodies. Always already a multivalent figure, the nun offers contemporary women a space to (re)determine their own meanings as they grapple with the desire for agency in a world that aims to silence them, to express their sexuality without being sexualized, and to embrace the complexities of gender and identity itself.

Ann Garriga and Carmen Urbita’s Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life (2025) exemplifies this turn in our cultural fascination with nuns. Following from their popular podcast—yes, a podcast about baroque nuns, Las hijas de Felipe, which is one of the most listened-to in the Spanish-speaking world—the book describes how the authors looked to nuns of the past for models as they faced the difficulties of isolated academic life during their grad school years. These models include Catherine of Siena, whose mystical visions helped persuade Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from the French city of Avignon to Rome, showing the real-world political power of a woman who has retreated from the world. Another is María de Jesús de Ágreda, a nun who never left her cloister in Spain but became known for her ability to bilocate (to be in two places at once through mystical/psychic projection), a gift that allowed her to evangelize the Jumano people of the American Southwest. For Garriga and Urbita, these women represent ways of working within apparent constraints—whether the convent, grad school, or life as a 21st-century woman—to find and exert agency.

Similar examples of female agency within the seeming restriction of the convent have also been bubbling up across a dichotomous range of films in the past two years. In The Nun II (2023), Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) returns to investigate a series of deaths attributed to the demon from the first film, finally banishing it by transforming sacramental wine into Christ’s blood, assuming for herself the authority traditionally afforded only to male clergy. In Conclave (2024), Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) reveals the quiet authority of nuns when she boldly states, “[A]lthough we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears.” In Los domingos (2025), directed by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, Basque teenager Ainara defies her family and asserts her own will by joining a convent. In the supernatural Korean thriller Dark Nuns (2025), two sisters collaborate to defy church hierarchy and exorcise a demon from a young boy. Across these films, convent life enables women to exert power in the world, a far cry from today’s digital platforms, which offer neither protection nor real political agency.

In addition to exploring a new kind of agency, the nun also offers a model for women to express sexuality on their own terms. In 2023, Spanish artist JC Reyes shared fabricated nude photos of Rosalía in an Instagram story, reflecting a trend of sexual deepfake images of women celebrities. Two years later, we might see Rosalía’s response in Lux’s cover art: she wears a nun’s habit, her arms wrapped in a self-embrace under clinging white fabric, her closed eyes recalling the private ecstasy of saints like Teresa of Ávila in Bernini’s famous sculpture. The habit allows Rosalía to retain control of her own sexuality, protecting it from manipulation and display by others. This function of the habit also appears in supplementary artwork for Lily Allen’s album from October, West End Girl, about her separation from her husband, actor David Harbour. In a video accompanying the song “Pussy Palace,” Allen wears a nun’s wimple while revealing her crossed legs and elegant black stilettos as she smokes a cigarette. Rihanna similarly donned a wimple combined with bright red lipstick for a 2024 Interview magazine cover shoot. Nuns’ clothing seems here to convey a message: “I’m sexy, but I’m keeping the best parts for myself.”

The convent also represents, perhaps counterintuitively, the freedom of sexual choice. Convent Wisdom looks to historic nuns like Inés de Santa Cruz and Catalina Ledesma as models for coming out as lesbian and navigating polyamorous relationships. In Immaculate (2024), Sydney Sweeney stars as a pregnant nun imprisoned in a convent whose members believe she is bearing the Messiah; the storyline explores a woman’s attempt to wrest back bodily autonomy from the forces that seek to control her, uncannily reflecting the actress’s own experiences as she reportedly pushed back against nude scenes in the HBO series Euphoria (2019– ). Meanwhile, the popular meme “I’m one situationship away from joining a convent” conveys women’s disillusionment with the contemporary dating world and choice to retreat from sex altogether as a form of radical self-care. Across these recent cultural productions, the convent has come to represent a space where women can control and own their sexual identities.

In a similar fashion, the present nunmania mobilizes the figure of the nun as a model for women who defy expectations and refuse ladylike decorum. Examples include The Phoenician Scheme’s (2025) lipsticked, pipe-smoking Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who becomes embroiled in her billionaire arms-dealer father’s business schemes, or the plotting Mother Superior–turned-criminal in a 2025 episode of the police procedural Elsbeth, whose boldness starkly counters the image of a dutiful, staid woman of God. In recent years, contemporary Catholic sisters themselves have also challenged stereotypes of the prim and proper nun by appearing online as hip spiritual guides. Boston nuns Sister Danielle Victoria Lussier and Sister Orianne Pietra René play challenges and pranks on Instagram and Tiktok. Two Brazilian nuns went viral with an impromptu beatbox and dance session in May 2025. This past December, 98-year-old Sister Maria Chiara and other sisters at her retirement home in Abruzzo, Italy, became a digital sensation with humorous videos about obedience and faith. As fictional and real-life nuns challenge expectations, blending virtue with naughtiness and humor, they model how women can evade narrow interpretation and embrace multiple, often contradictory identities.

These hydra-like functions of the nun in contemporary culture reflect the fact that real-world Catholic sisters are themselves multifaceted. While nuns were and are enmeshed in one of the world’s most patriarchal systems, they also draw on their positions to emerge as influential feminist leaders and thinkers, a part of their history often elided by cultural representations of decades (and centuries) past. Retreat into the cloister resulted in some of the earliest women’s writing by prolific authors like Hildegard of Bingen and Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nuns in the past who ran their own abbeys negotiated with political and ecclesiastical leaders in ways that women otherwise could not. Sisters such as the 13th-century Flemish Beatrice of Nazareth produced erotic visions of union with God that defy the notion of the asexual nun. At a time when women were seen as reproductive vessels, those who elected not to bear children and who ran their own communities challenged the very definition of what a woman could be, transgressing norms just as portrayals of nuns do today.

While Garriga and Urbita emphasize the relatability of nuns in their podcast’s mantra, “[T]odo lo que te pasa a ti, ya le pasó a una monja en los siglos XVI y XVII” (“Everything that happens to you has already happened to a nun in the 16th and 17th centuries”), for 21st-century women, nuns represent not just who we are but also who we want to become. Convent life is appealing not because it exactly mirrors our own lives but because it offers a corrective alternative: a vision of a refuge from social media’s superficiality and an existence devoted to a higher purpose in a community centered on women. More than any earlier moment, today’s craze honors the full complexity of these holy women. By embracing nuns as multivalent models for self-fashioning an empowered identity, women assert their own right to contain contradictions—to express themselves publicly while maintaining privacy, to be sexual while rejecting objectification, and to claim identities that meld devotion with edginess and humor. In a world that still prefers women to fit into narrow molds, the shape-shifting nun offers a radical way to determine our own meanings.