Pues no soy mujer. The Upheaval of Singularity in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Abstract

In titling this dissertation Pues no soy mujer: The Upheaval of Singularity in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, I decided to center my thesis on the revolution that sor Juana (San Miguel Nepantla 1648?- Mexico City 1695) started in the debate about singularity, sexedness, and in-betweenness—not only in the field of literary studies and literary criticism, but also in the broad landscape of feminist and gender studies. By defining herself neither as a woman, nor as a stable subject belonging to a fixed homogeneous group or genre, sor Juana opens an interesting debate about difference and non-binarism. As the several examples I analyze in this dissertation suggest, sor Juana problematizes the age-old question of identity from within. This causes not only a disintegration of the structure of identity and of the process of identification, but also a breakup of the very structuralist ground upon which they stand. Presenting a subject that is semiotic, unplaceable, and untranslatable, and that functions along with a sex that is, in its turn, singular, excessive, and also untranslatable, entails a profound reshaping of identity politics beyond the sphere of the metaphysic of presence. In my understanding, sor Juana interestingly configures a non-binary and fluid position for her subjectivity that even today can enter into a powerful dialogue with contemporary feminist theory. To put in evidence the dynamism of this subject I insisted in the first chapter on the fluidity of the subject; in the second chapter on the resistance that this subject operates against its sexual categorization as a woman; in the third chapter on the proximity between life and death and the continuous movement from a status to the other embodied by the allegory of the Phoenix; and in the fourth chapter on the “in betweenness” and the restlessness of sor Juana’s corpus that is impossible to be placed into a single canon once and for all. In sor Juana’s corpus identities are endless and impossible to grasp in their ultimate meaning. They remain forever impossible to place, neither fully present nor fully absent. They exist in a dangerous balance between (nepantla) life and death, dancing and moving, following the chaotic geometry of points, folding the ordinate symmetry of lines, and subverting the hegemonic order of the patriarchal and colonial world.