This chapter examines Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetic work as a project of reworking and renewing the dominant paradigms for representing the female body in seventeenth-century New Spain. Set against the backdrop of medieval effictio and the Petrarchan reformulations of courtly love and lyric embodiment—traditions whose influence on Sor Juana has been amply documented—the chapter explores how she simultaneously inhabits and unsettles the representational frameworks she inherits. Through her critical engagement with the Helen-like model of female iconicity, particularly in poems addressed to her female patronesses, Sor Juana exposes the structural tensions that underlie poetic inscription, tensions rooted in a male-dominated discourse that renders the beautiful body an object to be fixed by the gaze and dominated through language. Drawing on feminist theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derrida’s notion of the philosophical margin, the chapter argues that Sor Juana appropriates her Baroque era’s fascination with optical distortions, antithesis, and mirrored or refracted imagery to construct a poetic space in which she both displays her command of Petrarchan rhetoric and stretches it toward conceptual and ideological breaking points. In doing so, she reveals its insufficiencies to accommodate the female gaze and expressive needs, and opens new pathways for the poetic inscription of the female body from her singular vantage point as the first woman writer in the Hispanic tradition to sustain an extensive corpus on this theme. The chapter traces how this reformulation of the lyric body unfolds across a broad selection of Sor Juana’s texts. Her “Conceptist” Helen (or Helen-like celebrated beauty), depicted primarily in ekphrastic poems addressed to her Lysis or Lísida; her burlesque and “bald” Lisarda, as portrayed in Ovillejos 214; her writer’s body, revealed through meta-poetic commentary on the art of writing in multiple texts; and her “abstract” inquiring body, as formulated in poems such as Romance 48 and Primero sueño, are carefully excavated through the analysis, which examines how these Baroquely refracted body icons emerge from her sustained engagement with the subject. The chapter also engages with Sor Juana’s cultural body as constructed through the long and complex reception of her work by generations of sorjuanistas. In this dual register—textual and cultural, personal and inherited—Sor Juana occupies a pivotal position in the genealogy of the lyric body traced in this study, exposing a representational crisis intensified by the exhaustion of the Petrarchan tradition, while marking a shift toward new models of bodily inscription that will resonate throughout later traditions of women’s writing.

The Baroque and the Politics of the Absent Body

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2025年

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Osvaldo Cleger

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This chapter examines Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetic work as a project of reworking and renewing the dominant paradigms for representing the female body in seventeenth-century New Spain. Set against the backdrop of medieval effictio and the Petrarchan reformulations of courtly love and lyric embodiment—traditions whose influence on Sor Juana has been amply documented—the chapter explores how she simultaneously inhabits and unsettles the representational frameworks she inherits. Through her critical engagement with the Helen-like model of female iconicity, particularly in poems addressed to her female patronesses, Sor Juana exposes the structural tensions that underlie poetic inscription, tensions rooted in a male-dominated discourse that renders the beautiful body an object to be fixed by the gaze and dominated through language. Drawing on feminist theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derrida’s notion of the philosophical margin, the chapter argues that Sor Juana appropriates her Baroque era’s fascination with optical distortions, antithesis, and mirrored or refracted imagery to construct a poetic space in which she both displays her command of Petrarchan rhetoric and stretches it toward conceptual and ideological breaking points. In doing so, she reveals its insufficiencies to accommodate the female gaze and expressive needs, and opens new pathways for the poetic inscription of the female body from her singular vantage point as the first woman writer in the Hispanic tradition to sustain an extensive corpus on this theme. The chapter traces how this reformulation of the lyric body unfolds across a broad selection of Sor Juana’s texts. Her “Conceptist” Helen (or Helen-like celebrated beauty), depicted primarily in ekphrastic poems addressed to her Lysis or Lísida; her burlesque and “bald” Lisarda, as portrayed in Ovillejos 214; her writer’s body, revealed through meta-poetic commentary on the art of writing in multiple texts; and her “abstract” inquiring body, as formulated in poems such as Romance 48 and Primero sueño, are carefully excavated through the analysis, which examines how these Baroquely refracted body icons emerge from her sustained engagement with the subject. The chapter also engages with Sor Juana’s cultural body as constructed through the long and complex reception of her work by generations of sorjuanistas. In this dual register—textual and cultural, personal and inherited—Sor Juana occupies a pivotal position in the genealogy of the lyric body traced in this study, exposing a representational crisis intensified by the exhaustion of the Petrarchan tradition, while marking a shift toward new models of bodily inscription that will resonate throughout later traditions of women’s writing.