While most early modern authors align themselves with normative views on gender, Soror Maria do Céu (1658-1753) resists and subverts this tradition in her play Clavel, y Rosa, breve comedia aludida a los desposorios de María y Joseph (Carnation and Rose, a brief play on the marriage of Mary and Joseph, 1736). She achieves this in part by creating "feminine" male characters and assigning "masculine" characteristics to her female characters. Soror Maria affords more power and authority to women in her comedia, and she likewise undermines the validity of early modern social expectations related to men and masculinity by scrutinizing gender norms. In the end, Soror Maria creates a space of negotiation between the masculine and the feminine that allows for a reassessment of what it meant to be a man in late seventeenth-century Iberia.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.