Embodying the Virgin Mary, Christ and the Nation: A Contemporary Lebanese Female Mystic and her Unconventional Conduct” by Emma Aubin-Boltanski

This talk will focus on a female Lebanese mystic called Catherine of Nab’a, who has been living and officiating in her apartment in the suburbs of Beirut since the late 1990s. Catherine is a Maronite in her forties and is a married mother of three. Each Tuesday morning, she experiences a public ecstasy (inkhitāf). Every year, on Good Friday, surrounded by a number of faithful, she sees and experiences the Way of the Cross. The presentation will illustrate the complex interplay between this female mystic, her social and political environment, and the Maronite Church. Her activities and the rituals surrounding her stigmatized body will be analyzed in terms of the Foucauldian notion of “counter-conduct.”

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