The main objective of “People Like Us: Intimacy, Distance, and the Gender of Saints” by Maya Mayblin is to describe popular concepts about saints. Mayblin does this by depicting saints as commoners, explaining their roles, and describing how their genders are seen in different religions. She incorporated popular opinions from other historians and uses modern language to convey her input.
Mayblin directly states her thesis in her abstract. The purpose of her article is to “ explore how gender ambiguity both indexes and resolves a double imperative in Catholic practice: to identify with and promote a sense of contiguity between human and divine forms and to maintain a sense of distance and unknowability between worldly and otherworldly forms.”
