The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges - Hardcover

Mahmud, Lilith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022609572X ISBN 13: 9780226095721

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

From its traces in cryptic images on the dollar bill to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Freemasonry has long been one of the most romanticized secret societies in the world. But a simple fact escapes most depictions of this elite brotherhood: There are women Freemasons, too. In this groundbreaking ethnography, Lilith Mahmud takes readers inside Masonic lodges in contemporary Italy, where she observes the many ritualistic and fraternal bonds forged among women initiates of this elite and esoteric society.

Offering a tantalizing look behind lodge doors, The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters unveils a complex culture of discretion in which Freemasons simultaneously reveal some truths and hide others. Women—one of Freemasonry’s best-kept secrets—are often upper class and highly educated but paradoxically antifeminist, and their self-cultivation through the Masonic path is an effort to embrace the deeply gendered ideals of fraternity. Mahmud unravels this contradiction at the heart of Freemasonry: how it was at once responsible for many of the egalitarian concepts of the Enlightenment and yet has always been, and in Italy still remains, extremely exclusive.  The result is not only a thrilling look at an unfamiliar—and surprisingly influential—world, but a reevaluation altogether of the modern values and ideals that we now take for granted.

About this title

About the Author:

Lilith Mahmud is associate professor of gender & sexuality studies and anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Review:

“I commend this book not only for academic purposes but for anyone seeking a broader understanding of elites. With her bold ethnography, Mahmud delivers an admirable contribution to a growing literature of provincializing Europe and questioning its normative centrality to discourses presumed to have travelled to other locales. Above all this is a further critique of a tendency to discard ‘ethnographic subjects’ as not poor enough, not suffering enough, not being marginal enough. By asking ‘What about the unsympathetic subjects of ethnographic studies, whose right-wing or religious views on gender, class, race, sexuality, labor, nationalism, or the military, for instance might push anthropologists to the limits of our own cultural relativism,’ I take it to be part of a wider question contemporary anthropology faces, the ‘hierarchization’ of worthy ethnographic subjects. Mahmud takes a bold stance in answering this question by opening up the conditions of research and delivering a deeply humanistic and attractive ethnography about one of the most powerful global fraternities.”
(Reviews & Critical Commentary)

“In her brilliant ethnographic exegesis, Mahmud. . . persuasively links what appear to be the idiosyncratic predicaments of Freemason sisters to countless actors who have struggled and who continue to struggle in the great and small movements that punctuate the history of liberalism.” 
(American Ethnologist)

“The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges is getting accolades, and I can see why. In Mahmud’s careful hands, this study of gendered elite becomes one of subtleties and contradictions. While she traces how fraternity as an ‘intentional project’ reifies power differentials in practice, she never lets go of the belief that fraternity is in itself the ‘heart of humanism.’ Freemason lodges may very well be gendered, racialized, and class-based organizations, but Mahmud reminds us that the pursuit of fraternity is nonetheless a ‘profound source of meaning and purpose’ for us all.”
  (Association for Feminist Anthropology)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022609572X
• ISBN 13: 9780226095721
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256