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I focus this study on changes in the prayer lives of U.S. Catholic nuns following Vatican II; widespread institutional change in the Catholic Church that, among other things, transformed U.S. Catholic nuns’ lives. In the article, I combine a phenomenological model of embodiment with narrative analysis to show how institutional linguistic prayer practices transform elderly nuns’ embodied experience as they age. Drawing on naturalistic video‐ and audio‐recordings gathered over three years in a Catholic convent in the Midwestern United States, I show how changing communicative and embodied prayer practices following Vatican II have impacted U.S. Catholic nuns’ (1) understanding of the divine, (2) relationship with the divine, (3) embodied experience of the divine, and (4) how these changes have impacted their experiences of and interpretation of physical states including illness and pain. Overall, I offer insight into how changes in the nuns’ linguistic practice of prayer impact the nuns’ documented success in managing loneliness and chronic pain at the end of life.

These 3 communicative strategies offer examples of lexically and grammatically complex ways to communicate with older adults who have little other opportunity for similarly complex interaction and may reduce resistiveness to care, and linguistic isolation, which has been linked to cognitive decline.

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This article examines how individuals who identify with genders outside a male/female binary make use of the semiotic material available to them in the environment to interactively construct non-binary gender(s). Through microinteractional analysis of the speech produced by individuals who identify as genderqueer, the article demonstrates how individuals draw on an array of signs to create and perform non-normative genders. The article argues that the implementation of embodied signs can be understood using a model of semiotic agency, which reveals how the signs themselves vary in their durability and manipulability in time and space. The article further exemplifies how these semiotic displays are used to perform gender as non-binary, mutable, and changing in time. The article uncovers how genderqueer individuals both challenge and maintain a binary gender system in their daily interactions. Moreover, the article demonstrates how individuals draw on available semiotic material available in the environment in ways that allow gender to emerge dynamically in interaction and transform over time.