What is the Catholic School Girls' Cinematic Universe?

Cinematic universes make up one kind of shared universe, or fictional worlds that encompass two or more independently written stories. This means that multiple literary works with their own separate plot lines and cast of characters, while they don’t overlap, happen within the same fictionalized world.

Those of us who attended Catholic Schools, for all of, or just part of our education, lived in a kind of “shared universe.” The mission of The Catholic School Girls’ Cinematic Universe is to encapsulate this collective consciousness, the Catholic School zeitgeist, and to hold space for all the things that may mean.

To promote my upcoming book, The Catholic School Girls’ Guide to Cursive Writing, I am starting a special series wherein I read (or watch) and discuss books and films which portray different lived experiences within Catholicism from all over the world. If you want to know more about this project and read more articles about issues surrounding Catholicism in education and its cultural legacy definitely follow this series to get updates and more exclusive content.

Contemporary gothic literature and the horror movie genre hold a particular fascination over the lives of Catholic school girls, ruminating on themes of female sexuality, coming of age, and societal repression. Audiences flock to these stories whether or not they’ve been those school girls personally.

For outsiders, Catholic school girls (in uniforms) seem intimidating and mysterious, holding the keys to a world of exclusivity and generational wealth. For young women who’ve donned those uniforms at some point in their lives, these images and recognizable tropes tap into a collective memory, often evoking strong emotions, for better or worse.

Former Catholic school girls, especially those of us who attended school on any sort of scholarship, recognize later on in life that we have a unique experience. While it felt innocuous and completely normal growing up inside those insulated social bubbles, it ultimately set us apart once we stepped out of it.

I don’t intend to idealize these experiences in any way. In fact, many of us emerged scarred from traumatic experiences, some of which were par for the course and others which were horrible in their own special way.

If anything, the strict discipline and push for uniformity turned us into young Stoics with an air of self-seriousness. Nevertheless, our education provided the perfect template for us to challenge authority with brazen acts of defiance. Even if we only rebelled in small gestures of non-conformity that no one else could immediately detect, it established a steady practice of disobedience that embodies the women (or gender non-conforming adults) we have become.

Modern women and nonbinary people exist in perpetual opposition, even in the present day, to rigid standards based on compulsory gender roles. When something functions only in contrast to something else, how do you perceive it except within the context of polarity? We achieve self-actualization by extricating ourselves from other narratives that we’ve internalized from a lifetime of socialization.

That’s what makes storytelling so powerful. The Catholic School Girls’ Cinematic Universe resists homogenization and embraces the nuances and breadth of the experiences, thoughts, feelings, and desires of former and current Catholic School students. This includes holding space for the horrific abuses suffered by Residential School survivors and their descendants.

We must contend with the good, the bad, and the ugly to move forward and find any sort of redemption. We are not stronger from our suffering, but we learn to survive in spite of it.