New World Masculinity: The Lieutenant Nun— Hyperbole or Reality?

Early modern scholars continue to recognize and celebrate the Lieutenant Nun as historical figure, gender transgressor, theatrical persona, and myth. Although she never officially professed to any religious order, Catalina de Erauso’s epithet represents two distinct yet relevant realities, one which points to her life as a female novitiate in the Iberian Peninsula, while the other highlights her military prowess as lieutenant in the New World. As early as the title of the alleged self-account of her life, Historia de la monja alférez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma, readers become aware of an impending dissonance in gender performance. Consequently, a critical examination of Historia requires the reader to consider questions of gender identity and sexual orientation that are not definitively supported within the text. Such a feat, while seemingly feasible because of sporadic gender-identifying grammatical structures and arguably suggestive episodes of sexual attraction, often leads to a clearly speculative reading based on limited details and little psychological insight from the protagonist.

The question then, is how can scholars of early modern studies critically examine Catalina de Erauso in such a way that is historically and culturally accurate, yet simultaneously sensitive to contemporary ideologies of gender performativity? Despite the universal recognition of the performative quality of gender in the twenty first century, questions of authenticity tend to drive current critical interpretations of Catalina’s male persona. Allyson Poska rightly highlights that early modern female cross-dressing provided insight into the cultural expectations of men; however, she refers to women who cross-dressed as “Imposters performing masculinity…” (7). To refer to early modern women donning male clothing in this light acknowledges the performative quality of gender yet delegitimizes the performance according to sex. In other words, only biological men could legitimately perform masculinity. This general acknowledgment of gender as performance and its simultaneous rejection of the performer has largely influenced my view of the legitimacy of Catalina de Erauso’s masculine experience.

Independent of our critical assessments of her literary or historical personas, Erauso’s social, financial, and military success as a male in the New World is a testament to the credibility of her masculine performance in the eyes of her contemporaries. In early modern Europe, nobility was often an inseparable component of masculinity. In contrast, the reality of the New World restructured class-based notions of masculine performance, leveling the playing field for the accumulation of wealth and social mobility. Viewing the Lieutenant Nun’s gender performance according to European versus New World constructs of performativity allows a clearer understanding not only of early modern taxonomies of gender, but also of the Pope’s dispensation pardoning her deviation from the traditional European definition of femaleness. The present article confronts the critical notion that the Lieutenant Nun’s gender performance is a hyperbolic imitation of seventeenth-century gender normative male behavior and seeks to contextualize the authenticity of her masculine persona against the backdrop of the New World male experience. At the core of Historia’s intrigue is not homoerotic desire, intersexuality, transgenderism, or even cross-dressing, as these components of the narrative are inconclusive, but rather the legitimacy of a culturally-aware and calculated masculine identity performed by a biological female.

As readers of Historia we are not exposed to any conscious point of epiphany in which Catalina de Erauso, the adolescent novitiate, decides that she is a man. As critics of her text, we can assume that she gave thought to the emergence of her male disguise, yet her actions serve as our only guide to her behavior. After a physical altercation with a female superior, Catalina flees her Spanish convent, San Sebastián el Antiguo, fashions male clothing from her habit, and begins a life as a boy. From this point, she develops a somewhat picaresque lifestyle, moving from master to master, initially as a page, in the guise of her newly created male persona, Francisco Loyola. The teenager encounters family members such as her father, uncle, and mother during this time who fail to recognize her. Her father’s continued search for her is significant in that...