What is it about?
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz (1651-1695) was an iconic Mexican poet-intellectual and woman who loved women. Her position as a nun complicated not only her commitment to the life of the mind, but also her affective life. Examining present-day Chicana writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba's novel SOR JUANA'S SECOND DREAM (1999), this article explores a genre of historical and life writing that may be termed "lesbian auto-historiography." Types of reproduction that are not biological, namely copying and conjugation, help establish Sor Juana's place as the symbolic foremother of contemporary Latina lesbians' struggle for legitimacy and voice.
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Why is it important?
This research highlights critical and literary interventions by such contemporary Latina feminist writers as Emma Pérez, arguing that Gaspar de Alba’s version of Sor Juana's life strips reproduction of its exclusively heterosexual moorings and offers a lesbian hermeneutics (philosophy of meaning-making) that recalibrates and diversifies women's hard-earned right to create more than just children.
Perspectives
A spectrum of readers, especially those interested in the narratives and lives of Latinas and Latin American women who have paved the way for contemporary feminist struggle, especially sexual and intellectual freedom, will find inspiration and power in Sor Juana's fictionalized biography.
Dr. Nancy Kang
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Copying and Conjugation: Lesbian Autohistoriography as Reproduction in Alicia Gaspar de Albas Sor Juana's Second Dream, Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies, January 2021, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2021.0019.
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