With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

CHAPTER 4. Sor Juana and the Search for (Queer) Cultural Heroes

CHAPTER 4 Sor Juana and the Search for (Queer) Cultural Heroes Maybe, in the delirium of her deathbed, she imagined you—brownskinned , poor, female, sitting in a college classroom, reading about her, choosing among books, picking up a pen. Then her spirit flew into the sky over Mexico, bursting into hundreds of fragments of brilliant light, and became a new constellation. —AURORA LEVINS MORALES, REMEDIOS Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, seventeenth-century poet, scholar, and dramatist of New Spain, has frequently been claimed as a literary foremother to contemporary Mexicana, Chicana, and Latina writers. The Puertorriqueña poet and historian Aurora Levins Morales posits a direct relationship between Sor Juana and contemporary Latinas. In Remedios, a prose poetry history of Puerto Rican women, Levins Morales writes that today’s Latina students partake of the same rituals as Sor Juana, “choosing among books, picking up a pen.” “We” invoke “her” as our ancestress, culturally and symbolically, even though, unlike her, we are “brown-skinned [and] poor” as well as female. Of course, Sor Juana, a Catholic nun who bore no children, cannot literally be our ancestor, but figuratively we have been inclined to trace our literary heritage to this first feminist of the Americas as we pick up our pens. Born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje, Sor Juana was a self-taught prodigy who won the attention of the court of New Spain. A favorite of the Vicereina Leonor Carreto, Marquesa de Mancera, Juana was examined by more than forty scholars in a failed attempt to find a gap in her education. Although she entered the convent of San Jerónimo in Sor Juana and (Queer) Heroes 67 Mexico City, she was by no means isolated from society. Two volumes of her work were published in Madrid during her lifetime, and one volume posthumously. She is best known for her defense of women in “Carta Atenagórica” (1690). For many Chicana writers, she represents the beginning of three hundred years of Mexicana creativity. “An important cultural heroine who symbolizes the intellectual woman[,] . . . Sor Juana appears as a constant figure” in poetry, fiction, drama, film, art, and feminist theory by Chicana and Latina artists and authors (Rebolledo 1995, 58–59). She has been represented as a hero, a saint, a martyr, a feminist, a pawn, an individualist, a heterosexual in love with her confessor, a woman who completely denied her sexuality in favor of the life of the mind, and a lesbian who was “passionately attached to the Viceroy’s wife” (Levins Morales 2001, 43). I examine Sor Juana as a contradictory figure for Chicana writers and readers. On the one hand, she is lauded as the first feminist of the Americas and a foremother of Chicana feminism. On the other hand, she occupied a privileged racial and class position in the colonial hierarchies of New Spain. I discuss Octavio Paz’s biography of Sor Juana, especially in relation to Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “interview” with Sor Juana, Estela Portillo’s play Sor Juana (1983), María Luisa Bemberg’s film Yo, la peór de todas (1990), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s short stories and novel about Sor Juana. This Lesbian Nun Who Is Not One: The Traps of Faith Problematically for Chicana feminists, Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith (1988), has served as the authoritative text on the seventeenth -century nun. Paz’s early theoretical discussion, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961), renders Chicano/a culture in explicitly masculinist, sexist, and homophobic terms.1 That the only modern biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the “first feminist of the Americas”—should be written by Paz seems to add insult to injury. The Traps of Faith locates Sor Juana in the historical and cultural context of colonial New Spain, claiming her for the nation of Mexico. Paz attributes to Sor Juana a heterosexual orientation—in part, perhaps , to recuperate her from earlier homophobic biographers whose vulgar Freudianism painted her as having a “masculinity complex.” In 68 With Her Machete in Her Hand her “Interview with Sor Juana,” Gaspar de Alba discusses the specter of “masculinity” in biographies of Sor Juana: Octavio Paz is not the only one of Sor Juana’s critics and biographers to declare that there was nothing “abnormal” (to use their word) about Sor Juana; still, Paz is unique because instead of simply dismissing the possibility...