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IN HERIMAGE: CHRISTANDTHEFEMALE BODY INWOMEN'SRELIGIOUS POETRYOFTHE GOLDENAGE Julian Olivares Univers1ty of Houston It h~ been only within the last decade that feminist criticism has begun to reconsider the role of the female body in, what Elizabeth Grosz affirms, "the production of subjectivity, the operations of perception and consciousness, and the functioning of power relations" (1). The traditional identification of women with bo.dy and nature, and man with mind and culture gave rise to a mind/body split which, JU;;tdeeven wider by the essentialist and non-essentialist debate, 1 caused feminists to propound supra-corporeal theoretical paradigms. Because women have been limited to the body:, its biological and reproductive functions, a somophobia set in among feminist theorists. Recently, however, various feminists have returned to view the female body without the restrictions of the mind/body dualism, re-theorizing it, as Grosz notes ... in terms of its ability to provide explanations for women's social subordination, and ... its ability to help reconceptualize women's capacities for resistance to their social subordination and to provide positive terms in which to explain the process of social and psychical construction .... The body is no longer c9nstrued merely as natural, fixed, ahistorjcal or given; rather it is analyzed and given ontological status as effect or .result rather than a cause or giveness. It is no longer simply seen as art external limitation on women's capacities for transcendence, but is regarded as the pliable, variable condition of both women's identities and their differences from men, from other women, and from the narrow patriarchal characterization spawned by our received histories of thought. (2) The perception that the female body is not a barrier to transcendence is manifested in the writings of women religious of the Medi~val, Renaissance and Baroque; it is especially notable in the CAL[OPEVol. I, Nos. r-2 (1995): pages nr-r33 II2 ~ Julian Olivares_(., area of mysticism. Whereas the traditional perception sees the mystical experience as dependent on the loss of subjecthood· and the dissolution of II!ind /body and subject/ object oppositions (Antonopoulos 187), among various female mystics the body itself is frecuently the site and mode of transcendence. Instead Qf.feeing from the body in their aspiration of unity with God, women religious seek transcendence by means of the possibilities provided by fleshliness and the body (Bynum 1987,6). This study will endeavor to apply this somaticexpression and mode of transcendence to Spanish women religious poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast to the women who wrote secular love poetry and who had to recodify the poetics and object of desire,2with regard to sacred poetry the desired object for both genders was the same: God. The problem, then, for female religious writers was that of developing a discourse to express their female condition towards the aesired object. In this regard, women religious, in an extension of the metaphorical and traditional concept of Jesus as Mother (Bynum 1984), embraced the parallel tradition of Christ's body as female. This conception is based on philosophical, theological and physiological theories that, esssentially, share the same principle. Theories of procreation had it that a child receives its form, its life, from the father; its matter, body, from the mother. Philosophically and theologically, this coincides with the equation that "Woman is to Man as Body is to Soul." Therefore, with regard to God, man represents his spirituality and woman his humanity, that is, Christ. The implication, then, is that man is made more in God's image than woman. The connection between Christ's humanity and the feminine is noted, above all, in the fact that Christ did not have a human father, and that he derived his body completely from his mother, Mary. As Caroline Bynum notes, "Not only was Christ enfleshed with flesh from a woman; his own flesh did womanly things: it bled food and gave birth to new life" (1991,222). Christ has breasts that give forth milk, he has a womb in which souls are rebom. 3 Physiological theory also associated matter, food and flesh with female in another sense. It was believed, correctly, that the mother's blood fed the child in...

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