Why Celebrate Sor Juana?

I must admit I both thoroughly am enjoying the film I, Worst of All and am rather intrigued and confused by many aspects of it, namely the receptiveness of both some Spanish and Mexican clergypersons and political figures. It seems counterintuitive that during that time period Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz would have received such professional and intellectual respect from men within the Church but especially from men outside the Church. I particularly was fascinated by such when it became clear that her piety was both different and lacking.

Living as a poet and scientist more than a nun, Sor Juana certainly epitomized those who entered the monastery on account of the resources available there as opposed to the desire for absolute spiritual service. As those not “fascinated” by her frequently declared, she living a luxurious life as a black veil rather than a life dedicated to God. Sor Juana’s argument that her poetry is her service to God seems rather empty to me - she wrote that poetry for herself, for the intended person, for art and knowledge’s sakes, to build a legacy, etc. but not for the glory of God - or at least it appears to me. While the poems may not have been sacrilegious, it doesn’t seem that her intention was to glorify God through her gift but to glorify herself, which would be ok if she were not posing as a religious person, not to mention a nun (servant of God and bride of Christ).

Her comments about avoiding being chained down to a man as well as her interaction with the Vicereine force me to consider her sexuality. Although I cannot form any definitive opinions until concluding the movie (any reading more about her), it seems to me that Sor Juana may well be in love with the Vicereine - not a blanket lesbian - but in love with her specifically. Sor Juana seems so very opposed to marriage and romantic relationships with men in general, considering them an extensive of the repressive patriarchal system she has attempted to escape her whole life. In the monastery, she found a few nuns with whom she could share her thoughts and dreams but few with whom she could truly relate; however, the Vicereine appealed to Sor Juana with a sense of shared past and present, allowing her sense of isolation and loneliness to lessen.

I was rather confused by the handful of scenes involving Sor Juana and the Vicereine that could have simply demonstrated the depth of their friendship and connection as isolated women or could have been rather sexual - such as her unlacing the Vicereine’s dress/corset and the Vicereine’s telling Sor Juana she was only hers and kissing her.

Essentially, curious as to other’s opinions on this and anxious to see the conclusion. I truly am rather perplexed as to how Sor Juana received such acclaim as a nun both while she was alive and post-mortem; she clearly was very clever and innovative but she does not seem to have in any way have used those talents in the direction of the Church or its furtherance. So why is she such a celebrated nun?

A Female-Dominated Religious Sphere

While the religious sphere may have been controlled by men, it certainly seems to be dominated by women. Both in Spanish and Spanish-American societies, spirituality, religious education, religious participation, and strict religious adherence seem to be rather gendered in terms of femininity. Why is that? There are various possible explanations:

- Women, as leaders of the domestic sphere, lead the education and upbringing of children and therefore help ensure their children’s religious foundations.

- Women, as considered from the foundational, Biblical teachings of the Catholic tradition, are morally weak and capricious (as discussed in the previous post). Therefore, their proximity to the Church through religious education and practice is socially stressed and reinforced.

For these reasons, it seems to logically follow that women entered the Church in great numbers (again, for various reasons) and that the Church perhaps targeted women in the Inquisition, as seen through Marina de San Miguel’s confession. Both women and their families had economic and social reasons to choose a life in the Church – greater independence, greater ability to pursue knowledge, less immediate financial strain on the family, etc. As time passed, the monastery was intended not just for elites but open and welcome to women of all classes; such helps explain how Sor Juana de Ines – the illegitimate daughter of a non-elite – became the most famous nun of Spanish America. With such opportunity to enter the Church, up to 77% of women in some areas preferred to do so to getting married.

The Church also similarly socially targeted women in the Inquisition due to the socio-religious perception of women. In reading Marina de San Miguel’s Inquisition interrogation, I was first intrigued by the secretive methods employed – secret charges, secret prison, secret abduction, etc. In analyzing her responses and the inquisitors responses to such, I wondered at the rationale for her incarceration: Marina admitted that she had consented to commit certain “evil” acts (and did commit them) but that she “did not believe that she offended God because she did not have the intention of offending him.” Clearly, the Inquisition’s presumption of guilt and manner of considering intent greatly influenced both Marina’s interrogation and her sentencing – she received 100 lashes after being paraded naked to the waist and gagged and was sentenced to a fine of 100 pesos and to ten years’ reclusion in a plague hospital (not prison but a plague hospital – what?!).

Inquisition: State-Sponsored Terrorism

When we embarked on our discussion on witch hunts, in general but in Spanish America specifically, it did not phase me that the witch hunt specifically targeted women (perhaps this indicates how witches and witch hunts are portrayed to us as children). However, I soon began to wonder - why almost exclusively women?

It seemed “reasonable“ that the Spanish perceived indigenous religion as demonic on account of their Catholic mission to convert. Observing communities steeped in ritual, the Spanish made the short conclusive leap to consider these rituals demonic witchcraft.

In line with Catholic tradition and related religious gender roles, stemming from Eve‘s encounter with Satan as a snake and further developed, women are considered “capricious, emotional, … something that had to be dominated, conquered, and controlled… and weak, incapable, and consequently more susceptible to diabolic temptation” (Silverblatt 176). Such a conception, reinforced within the patriarchal culture, easily lent to a gendered idea of witch as feminine.

However, this distinctly gendered religious role bestowed with power (even if connected with a negative connotation) contradicts indigenous cultural gender parallelism, which characterized not only religious practices but all types of practice, public and private. This sort of parallelism is indicative of both Andean and Nahua civilizations. As such, women were not perceived as morally weak or subservient to men; instead, both men and women’s complementary contributions were considered integral to the successful accomplishment of community goals, including religion. Similarly, the notion of parallelism throughout Andean and Nahua cosmology denies the Western conception of Satan, as the singular embodiment of evil.

So with this in mind - how and why were witches persecuted? In reading Behar, Silverblatt, and Few, the issues that arise as more interesting are the following:

- Inquisition cases were generally initiated by members of the community and brought to the Church, meaning that the community understood the Church’s statute and embraced its tenet as commendable.

How and why did this occur?

Acculturation - Indigenous people originally did not accept Christianity à came to accept aspects à increasingly more aspects with increasing time and increasing hope for social mobility.

- Actions defined as witchcraft did not necessarily run contrary to Christianity - or rather are not as I traditionally conceive as witchcraft. I was struck by the sort of cultural integration that was persecuted as witchcraft and described by Few:

[Women] used popular religion in ways that were seen as dangerous to the colonial state. Yet popular religion was also empowering to these women, because they could use it to reshape and refabricate the “traditional” roles of women in a society structured by colonialism and patriarchy… the women’s actions were not a direct attack on church or state authority; they did not reject Catholicism or try to overthrow the state. They did, however, use religious resistance to push outward against the narrowly defined structures of their lives, creating an identity for themselves as women within colonial patriarchal structures. (p. 625)

- Lastly, why were these “witches” persecuted? A few theories.

To promote gendered conceptions of honor, which were also tied to class and race, as seen through Few’s cases of Dona Lorensa and Sebastiana.

Or

To promote the stability of the church and by extension of the state

The Inquisition against Dona Lorensa, an elite white woman, was initiated by a mulatto slave. This demonstrates the prevalence and severity of superstition in the state and fear of how it may contribute to state instability.

Nahua Parallelism Absent in Sex

“The attempt at sexual conquest through the confessional largely failed, instead producing a hybrid sexual system that survives today in many indigenous Mesoamerican societies. Though conscious efforts by Spaniards to alter Nahua ideas of sexuality did not succeed, much change did occur as the Nahua came into daily contact with the Hispanized people….”

This quote from Pete Sigal’s “Queer Nahuatl: Sahagun’s Faggot’s and Sodomit’s, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites” (pg. 13) summarizes so succinctly a variety of themes and forces within both pre- and colonial Mesoamerica in relation to sexual-social conquest.

I find this discussion of Spanish conquest of Nahua (and Mesoamerican more generally) culture in terms of its degree of success particularly interesting, as I recall our consideration of pre-colonial Mesoamerican civilization at the beginning of the semester. Nahua society was defined, similarly to Andean, with parallel gender relations and delineated social expectations; as such, absolutely distinct and separate economic and social roles (and also religious in most cases) existed for males and females. However, sexual roles and behaviors seem less absolutely distinct, as seen upon the arrival of the Spanish.

The Spanish, arriving in the new world both with a goal to settled an untamed land and people but also Christianize such, condemned the sexual-social behavior they found in Nahua society, referring to such with pejorative language, such as puto, sometico, xochihua, cuiloni, and patlachuia. But prior to the arrival of the Spanish, there appears no evidence (though there remains little direct historical record available) to demonstrate that Nahua penalized or condemned such behavior (Sigal 23). Indeed, it is most fascinating to consider the likelihood of such sexuality liberty in Nahua society since every other aspect of their society seemed to thrive under the operation of such binary gender-sex social relations.

However, the Spanish, with a desire to impose both royal and ecclesiastical authority over the Nahua, perhaps found the greatest outlet for doing so in regulating sexual behavior. The Spanish both defined newly acceptable and unacceptable sexual roles and activities for Nahua males and females and established a system of punishment for violations of these defined acceptable standards that reinforced the authorities’ power (e.g. alcalde del barrio and la ronde).