Plotting Women

Mediaciones Del Yo Y Monstruosidad: Sor Juana O El "Fénix" Barroco

“…Finalmente, porque en la escritura de este texto se trazan las huellas de una construcción subjetiva y singular que nos posibilita analizar y conocer en detalle la inestabilidad de los dispositivos discursivos de control social en la ciudad letrada novohispana y, simultáneamente, atestiguar la emergencia de una nueva conciencia femenina y criolla. Prestigiosos críticos literarios como Octavio Paz (1982), Marié-Cécile Benassy-Berling (1983), Josefi na Ludmer (1985), Jean Franco (1989), Margo Glantz (1992Glantz ( , 1995, Georgina Sabat de Rivers (1998), Martínez-San Miguel (1999), Luciani (2004), entre otros, han mostrado con insistencia y rigor analítico la extraordinaria riqueza que la Respuesta exhibe no solo en su arquitectura retórico-lingüística, sino también en el ámbito de las dimensiones políticas, fi losófi cas, religiosas y culturales que el texto articula en el interior del entramado material y simbólico de la sociedad colonial novohispana. En este artículo me propongo revisar la Respuesta a Sor Filotea con el objetivo múltiple de analizar la confi guración discursiva del sujeto enunciador, esto es, las técnicas de la máquina retórica barroca que se ponen en juego dentro la Respuesta y las potencialidades e imposibilidades que dicha máquina plantea para la representación de la subjetividad.…”

Convents and Nuns: New Approaches to the Study of Female Religious Institutions in Colonial Mexico

“…38 Mysticism, associated in a positive way with women and convents in the earlier period, now came to be associated with them in a negative way, as female affinity for divine visions was increasingly attributed not to women's greater receptivity, but to their greater irrationality. 39 Similarly, while particularly obedient or pious nuns were still written about after the middle of the eighteenth century, because they possessed desirable qualities worthy of emulation, the enthusiasm for nuns to write their own stories seems to have faded with the increased emphasis on female irrationality. 40 An excellent recent treatment of these phenomena is Gunnarsdóttir's moving analysis of the life and times of Francisca de los Angeles, whom she situates as a transitional figure between the baroque and the enlightenment; the book captures the sense that the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century nuns were part of a transitory moment during which their saintliness and piety were celebrated by male ecclesiastics.…”

“…The clergy did, 'unwittingly', create a space for female empowerment, Franco says, but they did this 'by subordinating women on the grounds of their lesser rationality and relegating them to the domain of feeling'. 61 Recent literary scholars have achieved a resolution of sorts: the convent operated in a patriarchal world and nuns accepted the need to obey their male superiors, but at the same time it created space for women to exercise more freedom of action than was generally true in the outside world. A recent example is Stephanie Kirk's Convent Life in Colonial Mexico, which casts her argument about women's writing in a variety of contexts within a framework of patriarchy but emphasizes the separateness of the female community (the convent) and its differences from the clerical discourse about what that community was and should be.…”

The Salience and Pervasiveness of the Literary Figure of the Jew in Latin America: From Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Jorge Luis Borges

“…Specifically, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's El divino Narciso (1689) and Jorge Luis Borges's "El milagro secreto" (1944) indicate the pervasive salience of "the Jew" in regional literary conversations about power, collectivity, and legitimacy vis-à-vis a more powerful Europe as much in the context of the Spanish colonial empire of the seventeenth century as in the face of the global threat of Nazism in the twentieth century. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz thereby proves not only to be New Spain's leading female intellectual (Merrim 1991(Merrim , 1999Franco 1989); she is among Jorge Luis Borges's precursors in challenging Latin American regional identity and global agency apropos of the metropole's exclusionary violence toward the Jew within.…”