Religiosity and Spirituality in Linda Mary Montano’s Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract This paper presents a close-up reading of American artist and ex-member of the Maryknoll Sisters, Linda Mary Montano. Her performance in the video work, Anorexia Nervosa (1981) is analyzed in view of contemporary performance and video art by women artists in the second wave feminism. By positioning the experience of self-starving in the Catholic tradition of holy fasting and asceticism of self-starvation, this paper regards Montano’s video work as a continuation of Catholic women utilizing social agencies. Montano’s own performance in Anorexia Nervosa can be seen as one of many forms of keeping the faith while exercising contemporary art with a mission of disrupting social boundaries and norms. Montano’s understanding of the body as a vehicle of performance art is still resonant with her religiosity of elevating self-starving to a miraculous intervention. Her mundane narrative of the extraordinary supports her view that her life is art; art is life.