In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Pain, Knowledge, and the Female Body in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz stephanie kirk washington university in st. louis  O wrangling school, that search what fire Shall burne this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire, That this her feaver might be it? —John Donne, ‘‘A Feaver’’ In late-seventeenth-century Mexico, pain and suffering and, by extension, death, occupied a privileged place in the cultural imagination and were closely associated with the attainment of truth and knowledge.1 However, both suffering and knowledge were deeply embedded in power structures that excluded women. In this study, I will show how Sor Juana responds to such exclusion by promoting physical torment as women’s way to cross the enemy lines of the patriarchy and gain access to knowledge.2 Through poetic depictions of Katharine of Alexandria and Lucretia, Sor Juana forges a bond between female suffering and the attainment of knowledge and, in so doing, rewrites the meaning inscribed on a female body so often cast as a site of weakness and lust. Stephanie Merrim has identified the existence of a metaphorical space, what she has called ‘‘the city of knowledge,’’ whose doors seemed forever closed to women of the early modern period (194). Throughout history, society has attempted to gender knowledge as male, conferring what Sneja Gunew terms ‘‘le1 I will be using the concepts of ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘knowledge’’ as connected concepts in this paper, basing this on Foucault’s analysis of truth as interpreted knowledge and the way both are intimately implicated in power structures. Further, I am using ‘‘truth’’ here in the sense of what Gupta calls ‘‘truth effects,’’ for, as she says, ‘‘[absolute truth] is difficult to discover and might be said to belong to the domain of rhetoric (persuasive truth) rather than to any kind of objective reality. Who or what decides how or when knowledge in the sense of ‘‘truth’’ has been reached. Does gender come into this?’’ (13). 2 It is impossible to discuss physical pain without referring to Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. However, Scarry herself makes a distinction between sacred or religious pain and the contemporary practices of torture she addresses. She shows how pain in a religious context is not an act of denying physicality but rather ‘‘a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly and contentless force’’ (32). Mitchell B. Merback has highlighted this distinction in Scarry’s book, showing how pain in a religious context is ‘‘not ‘world-destroying’ in the sense theorized in Elaine Scarry’s brilliant essay on the structure of torture, but rather ‘world-making’’’ (20). It is this conception of pain that I am using in my discussion of Sor Juana’s use of it as a path to knowledge. 38  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) gitimation’’ on certain types of knowledge through such mechanisms as ‘‘the specific machinery of formal education,’’ while excluding others (13). This authoritative legitimation, she argues, effectively ‘‘territorialized’’ knowledge, creating forbidden zones—the city of knowledge, for example—to which women were, historically, denied access. Ironically, while this legitimated knowledge was indeed conceived of as restricted and proprietary, it was nonetheless promoted as being objective and universal (Gunew 17).3 The paradox of this exclusionary universality both prevented women from participating in mainstream knowledge and undermined their attempts to work outside this system. Sor Juana’s relentless search for knowledge emerges as a constant and unifying thread in her multi-faceted work, which encompasses many genres and themes. She does not characterize the search for knowledge as easy, certainly. The intellectual explorations she undertook were particularly hindered by society ’s resistance to women’s desire to learn, and Sor Juana makes it clear that she is aware and resentful of her exclusion from the city of knowledge. Her enforced auto-didacticism is a topic she revisits constantly in her work, characterizing her education as a solitary pursuit full of obstacles and difficulties.4 To emphasize the struggle she underwent to educate herself, Sor Juana...

pdf

Share