Bonus Episode - Dr. Stephanie Kirk (Full Interview)

This episode features a detailed interview with Dr. Stephanie Kirk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the complex dynamics of gender and knowledge in colonial Mexico.

1. Sor Juana's writings were a blend of intellectual rebellion and subtle compliance to cultural norms of her time.
2. She utilized her literary works to challenge the restricted access to knowledge for women in the 17th-century colonial Mexico.
3. Dr. Kirk highlights the proto-feminist themes in Sor Juana's writings, considering them precursors to modern feminist movements.
4. The interview discusses the complex relationship between Sor Juana's literary fame and her conflicts with church authorities.
5. Sor Juana's legacy continues to influence contemporary discussions on gender, knowledge, and power.

1: Introduction to Dr. Stephanie Kirk

Dr. Stephanie Kirk discusses her academic background and her connection to Sor Juana through her studies. Adrian Dustin Munoz: "Welcome, Dr. Kirk, could you share with us your academic journey and connection to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz?"

2: Exploring Sor Juana's Proto-Feminism

Discussion on proto-feminism and how Sor Juana's work predated formal feminist ideologies by articulating women's rights in her writings. Stephanie Kirk: "Proto-feminism, for me, is anyone espousing ideals for themselves or others to access things men were allowed but women were forbidden."

3: Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Sor Juana's Time

Insights into the Hispanic Baroque period and its influence on Sor Juana's literary and intellectual pursuits. Stephanie Kirk: "The period was marked by a rich cultural output tightly controlled by religious and state power, impacting access to knowledge."

4: Sor Juana's Challenges and Triumphs

A deep dive into Sor Juana's personal struggles with the church's limitations and her triumphs in literary accomplishments despite these hurdles. Stephanie Kirk: "She was adept at navigating the strictures imposed by the church while still producing work that subtly challenged those very limits."

1. Engage with historical texts to understand the roots of modern gender discussions.
2. Explore the intersections of literature, history, and feminism in personal or academic research.
3. Recognize and challenge the historical and ongoing restrictions on women's access to education and intellectual fields.
4. Advocate for the inclusion of diverse literary works in educational curricula to broaden perspectives.
5. Foster discussions on the impact of historical figures in shaping contemporary gender roles.

In our latest piece of bonus content, writer Adrián Duston-Muñoz talks with professor of Hispanic Studies Dr. Stephanie Kirk about Mexico's Baroque period, the gender politics of knowledge during that time, and the connections between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and modern day feminism.

Dr. Stephanie Kirk is the Director of the Center for the Humanities and a Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of two books: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Routledge, 2016) and Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Florida UP, 2007). She has also published numerous articles and essays on gender and religious culture in colonial Mexico, and on the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She has edited two collected volumes: Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Penn Press, 2014) and Estudios coloniales en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios (IILI, 2011). She is currently preparing a translation and critical edition of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s convent chronicle Paraíso occidental. Stephanie Kirk is the editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

People

Stephanie Kirk, Adrian Dustin Munoz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Companies

None

Books

"Sor Juana Ynez de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico"

Guest Name(s):

Dr. Stephanie Kirk

Content Warnings:

None

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Next chapter, podcast.

I wanted to say welcome to our special guest. Today. There's another episode of bonus content for Beef with Bridget Todd. My name is Adrian Dustin Munoz, and I'm joined by a very special guest, Doctor Stephanie Kirk. And correct me if any of this is inaccurate, but I see here you've got a PhD from New York University, and you're a professor of spanish, comparative literature, and women, gender and sexuality studies at Washington University in St.

Louis. That is true. In addition, you've written a couple of books, one of which is 2016, Sor Juana Ynez de la Cruz and the gender politics of knowledge in colonial Mexico. We're so glad to have you here. Thank you so much.

Stephanie Kirk

Well, thank you so much for inviting me and for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my very favorite subjects. Well, so. All right, I'd like to start there then. What drew you, on a personal level, to Sor Juanas de la Cruz? What drew me to Sor Juana?

So many things. As a PhD student at NYU, I took lots of classes on colonial latin american literature, studied Sorkwana, read. The very first thing I read of hers is the respuesta to Sor Filotea, the response to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, which Miss magazine, I think, in the seventies, had called, like, the first feminist text of the Americas. And as a feminist, I fell in love with the idea of a woman writing within, you know, the strict confines of the Catholic Church, espousing what to me seemed like proto feminist ideals around the acquisition of knowledge and how difficult it had been for her to get the education she needed. And as a first generation student, it resonated with me, even though the milieu's were completely and radically different.

So it seemed like she spoke to me, and I feel like there's so many things about her life that interest me as a scholar, but also as a woman. Well, La Rezuesta, we're definitely going to get to that later because this is arguably one of her more famous works. But I wanted to touch on something you just mentioned. You said, proto feminism, which, as I understand it, is feminism before the establishment of even a concept of feminism. So I'd like to talk a little bit of epochs.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Maybe you could help me define proto feminism in a more accurate way and also maybe just give a little bit of context to the period in which she wrote in the late 16 hundreds, which is kind of known as the end of the spanish baroque, I believe. Hispanic baroque, I believe. That is correct. It is the end of the hispanic baroque. So what is proto feminism?

Stephanie Kirk

There are people who discuss Soqana's works in terms of her being a feminist. The MS magazine article. But for me, feminism is a construct or a movement that is from the 20th century, although we see plenty of people, the suffragettes, for example, I went to a school in Manchester that was founded by suffragettes. So the suffragettes were proto feminists in that they were advocating for women's rights and the women's right to vote feminism, which is probably 1950s, sixties, arguable, but, you know, that's another conversation. So proto feminism for me is anyone who's espousing these ideals or working for themselves or for others to try and access the things that men were allowed to do but women were forbidden from doing, such as, in the case of sorpana, the pursuit of knowledge or scholarship or writing, or the right to have this kind of engaged life.

And what was it like for her? What was it like intellectually at the end of the 17th century? It's a really good question. The spanish baroque is a hispanic baroque. It's a very complex artistic, literary, political, social movement, in the sense that there was incredible artistic production, exuberance.

Anyone who's been lucky enough to have been to Mexico, for example, to see that as incredible, colonial architecture, which is a great example of the baroque, but it was also a time of religious control and state control over thought, over culture expression. Not as much as some people would have you believe. There was resistance and there was agency on behalf of many different kinds of people. But I think it's definitely a time when access to knowledge, access to culture, was definitely controlled. And what you could say about love, sex, religion was definitely circumscribed and controlled by the church.

There were no schools for women, there was no place for women to study. Women who were lucky enough to have means and a supportive parents could maybe have a tutor. Lots of girls were educated in the convent where they took music lessons and needlework. But there wasn't really a way for women to get educated, and only really the elites could be educated. There were some always exceptions to any rule, I think.

But mainly education was deeply religious, bound up with religion. The Jesuits are the perfect example, cultural and religious expression, and they controlled education for boys as well. So it's an interesting time of religious fervor and cultural production attached to religious fervor. So amazing religious texts and music and architecture, but also some control over what other kinds of expressions people might want to engage in. Now, there was a lot of, you were talking about sort of access to education.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

And really, I think the theme of the piece about sort of versus the catholic church, the main theme of it for me is the acquisition of knowledge, or the right to acquire knowledge. What was it like for a young girl in the court? Because I know that she had, like a sponsor, if you will, in the vice rene, in her territoriality, I suppose. So what was it like for her to be a. I know she learned early on from her grandfather's library, but she was kind of coached by the sort of local magistrate's wife, if you will.

Is that like, what was it like in the court there? Well, what was it like in the court for a young woman? So the vice regal court and the vice ren? Of who you just mentioned was basically a copy of the spanish court in New Spain. In the case of Sorghuana, there was another vice regal system in Peru that was probably just as lavish.

Stephanie Kirk

So it was basically a reproduction of the spanish court. That viceroy was the king's representative in the new world in this case. And so all the things that we think of existing in courtly culture, like plays and music. Music and art and patronage, did exist very much in Mexico, as they did in Spain. And Sor Juana entered the court through.

I mean, it's interesting. I don't think it was not widely known, but she was illegitimate from an okay family, but definitely not noble in any way or particularly wealthy, but through connections, entered the court. And because I think of her absolute brilliance and singularity, became a favorite of the vice ren, Leonor Carreto, who, to whom she wrote poetry. They had a very close bond, and she supported her. She had also studied as well, Latin, and she had had patrons in the church as well.

So a very famous Jesuit, Antonio Nunez de Miranda, also took an interest. He was very connected. He was like confessor to the viceroy. So she received all this interest from both religious and secular authorities because of how brilliant she was and how different than everybody else she very much appeared to be. The term that stuck out to me that you just used was lavish.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

I love that term. I mean, when you think of a period that has such a revival of, like you said, of music, of playwriting, of architecture, I mean, you think about a sort of advanced society in which war and political issues are not at the forefront. There's a place for art to flourish, which means, you know, maybe stable, middle class and people are actually able to live their lives. But at the same time, this is still at the tail end of the Spanish Inquisition, which, granted was, you know, a continent, a continent and ocean away. But that still had to be present, right?

Stephanie Kirk

Well, it was in an ocean away. So the spanish inquisition was indeed present. The mexican inquisition was founded in the 16th century and very active, very interested in making sure orthodoxy of religious expression in particular. And that was maintained. And there are fascinating indexes of prohibited books, and although there's always a great distinction between what is prohibited and what is allowed to circulate.

So, for example, you weren't allowed to read novels of any kind, or they were not supposed to. They were not allowed into Mexico, but of course they came in, and there's all kinds of networks of things circulating that weren't appropriate. You see people being punished by the Inquisition for writing obscene verses or things like that. But I think the more sinister piece of the Inquisition, although there's been a lot of revisionist history around the inquisition, and it's not quite the burn everybody to cinders organization, although they did do plenty of that, but it's not quite on the scale and intensity that maybe we had thought. But they did do a lot of things around, for example, sexual crimes.

There were people who were executed for homosexuality. There were people who were suspected of, you know, adhering to the jewish faith, who were executed right at the beginning of the inquisition. They executed indigenous people, but then the inquisition was then not allowed to prosecute indigenous peoples, although Africans and afro descendant peoples were very much persecuted by the inquisition. So the inquisition is very much alive and well. So I think the lavishness of the culture and the cultural expression is very much taken place within the confines of what the church thought was acceptable.

And Sor Juana, I think, was very good at navigating that. And scholars have read all kinds of things into her work that the inquisition would not have necessarily noticed or liked had they noticed it. I gotta say, that was one of my favorite parts in doing the research for this subject. Cause two months ago, I didn't know this woman's name and delving into her poetry. I mean, she really seems adept at talking about the things that you're not supposed to be talking about, but not overtly letting you know that that's what she's talking about.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

I mean, she really was, if you get down deep into the sort of vocabulary that she used and the references that she made, I mean, she really was quite gifted at sort of dancing between the laser beams. Can you talk a little bit about literacy rates in Mexico at that time? They're very low. They're very, very low. I mean, I'm not a historian of literacy.

Stephanie Kirk

So I don't have. And I'm not very good at the facts and figures, as a historian might be, but they're very low. Literacy is a privilege of the elite. I think nuns were supposed to have basic literacy to enter the convent, and most nuns came from the elite, or they had a sponsor, like Sorjuana did. A wealthy man paid for her to enter the convent, her dowry to enter the convent.

But nuns could only be white. Until the 18th century, only white women could profess. There were plenty of women of color living in the convent, but they were living there as servants or what we call oblates in English, which is women who were given to the church and to the convent and took sort of lower level orders. But to professors and nun, you absolutely had to be a white woman. And it wasn't till the late 18th century or mid 18th century when indigenous women were allowed to profess.

So that's a very important thing to remember. So again, literacy and access. And if nuns are slightly more literate than the average woman, that's because they're also from the elite. Even her identity as a mixed race criolla at that point, was it just literally the color of her skin that would get her in? So she was not mixed race.

She was a kiriyoya of white parents. Both her parents were white. There's been lots of speculation about sorghuana, but there's never been speculation, as far as I know, that she wasn't of any other racial group than white. Now, she was a kirioya, as you said, which is a term that is used to talk about people of spanish heritage that were born in the new world. So Mexico.

And I'm using the new world in a very ironic way, just f one. There was a world, a very advanced world before, but the new world from the perspective of Europeans. So her dad was of spanish origin. I think he might have come over from Spain. And her mother was maybe second generation Criolla.

The term criollo actually came initially, was used to describe people of afro descent who were first born into to the new world, but then it was co opted by white subjects to refer to themselves. Surprise, surprise. Such a surprise. Yeah. Right.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

So one of the things I wanted to talk about that you mentioned is one of these sort of deep cut references that speaks to sort Juana's knowledge of the classics and her grasp of Latin and just her knowledge base. Can you talk a little bit about the allegorical character of Lucrezia and what she meant to sorta what did the. Allegorical character of Lucrezia mean? I think lucrecias are really interesting. And you see, she's not alone in being one of sorta's kind of oft invoked heroines.

Stephanie Kirk

She really loved to invoke women who had, throughout history, mythology, religion, egyptian religion. Isis was another one that she liked. But women who she found stood out for their engagement with knowledge, for example, or with other acts like political knowledge. In the case of Lucrecia, I think the sacrifice that she makes to save Rome. So can you speak overtly of that sacrifice?

Adrian Dustin Munoz

I mean, she was a victim of. Rape, but it was, she was a victim of rape and she chose to take her own life. And I wrote an article about this that's not particularly fresh in my mind, I have to say. It was a very long time ago. But the idea being that the act of self sacrifice, of bodily sacrifice, was a way of securing knowledge production.

Stephanie Kirk

And I think you see this in Sorkana's use of lucrecia. Lucrece, who, after being raped by Tarquin, threatened the stability of the empire and took her own life as a way of securing the continuance of that is the interpretation that Sor Juana makes of Lucrecia's death. And you can also see that in the figure of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who's another figure that really appealed to Sor Juana, who was martyred for her engaged faith and engaged in the sense of producer of knowledge. She's a doctor of the church and was martyred and willing to die to preserve the idea of knowledge and Christianity. So in sort, Juana's invocation of all of these early, I was gonna say feminist heroes, but just women heroes of classic literature, of classic history.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Was this already seen as descent from the catholic rules of the time, or was this just a writer writing about stuff that only the elites could read about? I mean, was this performance venues where sort of the rank and file of Mexico could, you know, look to these female heroes? Or was this still something that was largely going by under the radar? I think it's both, and I think it does. I think her work went under the radar or was circulated only with elites, at least in the space of Mexico, because her works were never printed in Mexico.

Stephanie Kirk

So they would have. Although manuscript circulation is. I think maybe one of her works was, but most of her works were printed in Europe, in Spain and in Portugal. But manuscript circulation is much more robust than we give it credit for and coexisted with print. But I think, like her plays were performed at court or in the convent.

I think she was apparently a composer, although we've lost access to her music. And there's a really wonderful scholar of, obviously, Sarah Finlay, who's worked a lot on Sorjuana's music, but things like these carols that she wrote. So she wrote the series of carols on St. Catherine and on other subjects. But the one on St Catherine are the most beautiful and the most, you know, for me, the most interesting because of her invocation of St.

Catherine of Alexandria. Those would have been performed in cathedrals and people would have had access to them and would have been able to listen to them and listen to the lyrics, which means that there was the potential for a wider circulation of her work. Now, the poetry, the kind of courtly love sonnets and romances were probably for a smaller readership, but they were printed in several printings in Spain and Portugal. So she would ship the manuscripts off to Spain to one of her former vice, regal protectors there. And they were then published and circulated widely, and they went into many, many different printings.

And there's evidence that people in early modern Sweden might have read her poetry. They were in Peru. So she had a lot of defenders in Peru. And that makes it seem like that would be an easy thing to circulate manuscripts from Mexico to Peru, but it actually really wasn't that easy. So I think, yes, it was a small handful of readers, maybe in New Spain, as Mexico was called then, but a much wider readership outside of New Spain.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

I think this is sort of the most exciting, sort of titillating part of her work is you mentioned some of her romances, and she also had a sequence of sonnets known as the burlesque sonnets. One of my favorites that she wrote was love open a mortal wound, in which, I mean, there's translations here, but, I mean, there's some very seemingly overt references to sex, sexuality, orgasms, possibly homosexual relationships. How does one in her position get away with something like that at that time? And also as a nun, it begs the question, how and why is she writing about these things? Again, I think it's very.

Stephanie Kirk

That these burlesque sonnets do exist as a group of them, and they're incredibly bawdy, I suppose, would be the word. It's a very kind of off the time word, and very, I wouldn't say vulgar, because she was just such an exquisite stylist. But the content, if you were to describe it, could be, you know, seen as vulgar and does, as you say, touch on these very sort of like sexual themes. If you read, keep reading the way that, you know, I think she intended us to read, but they're coded, right? So she can't.

But this is what got her in trouble. So, you know, there are people that say that she wasn't in trouble, but she really was in trouble. She was definitively critiqued for writing about what they were called profane matters, matters that did not pertain to religion, matters that did not pertain to the church, and matters that really took her out of the realm, very far away from the realm of what was acceptable for a woman, a religious woman, writing in the 17th century. What do you imagine were the stakes for her? Because eventually, I mean, I would like to get into some of the historical stuff here of, like you said, la recuesta to sor Filotea, which was essentially a, you know, written by a man is staged to be written by a woman.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

What was she taking on by dissenting with this 40 year old text? And what were the stakes for her? Was she aware of them as she sort of. In the past, she'd written things that were not in alignment with the church, but now she's really overtly taking on a church member, a respected portuguese sermon, and saying, no, this is wrong. I don't believe in this at all.

What were the stakes for her in doing something like that? I mean, the stakes were high, but at the same time, I think she received a lot of mixed messages. You know, she was told, like, you know, you shouldn't really be engaging in these, like, frivolous or inappropriate secular writings. You know, dedicate yourself to topics that are much more appropriate, such as theology. But theology, of course, is the provision of men.

Stephanie Kirk

But from her perspective, she was just as learned as these men who were writing about theology. And she would host these discussion groups, what we would probably call a discussion group, or, you know, a tertullia. She would be behind the railings in the convent, but they were in the locutorio. In this kind of reception area. They were allowed to receive people.

Nuns were cloistered, but they were not cut off from the world. So she would have these, like, very intense discussions. And the conventional wisdom, although there were those that dispute it, the conventional wisdom is that she had this kind of ongoing discussion with people about these finesses of de Cristo, like, what was the most, you know, exquisite favor that Christ did for, you know, humankind? And it's a theological point that she debated with in texts, but she discussed it apparently in conversation, and so decided to write it up at the behest of the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, who wrote a letter then critiquing her for doing so in the name, using the name of another nun, sor filotea. But the stakes were high.

But at the same time, it was an appropriate topic of conversation. It's theology, it's christianity. Nothing that she said was even remotely scandalous. The only thing that was scandalous about what she was was who was saying it, that she was saying it. I think that the dispute that she has with Viera is the kind of theological dispute that men had all the time, that they were.

That's what the jesuit colleges were doing. They were always having these kinds of disputes and discussions around the finer points of theology. So the only real problem here was who was disputing and the fact that she published it. But she never intended to publish it. She wrote it down, and it was published.

And like I said, manuscript culture was very robust, so people would share things in manuscripts all the time. And from what she says in the respuesta, she never intended to publish it. I mean, I love the idea of these manuscripts being passed around, like 14 year old girls passing around Lady Chatterley's lover that they stole from the library or something like that. I mean, it really does paint a bit picture that way. But what I find really interesting about her, and also a lot of figures like her, is that you kind of have these parallel roads of her.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Yes, she's a feminist hero, but she really just was a woman who wanted to be learned and was kind of, this was her avenue, which was just, look, I just want to know things, and I want to write things. And then, as you say, her points were accurate. She always defended herself by a million references to theology or history, as you say, just the way that the Jesuits would argue. And yet she kind of got forced into this lane of being representative of her people, which in this argument, her people is women. It's interesting to me to see these parallel lanes, and it speaks to the hypocrisy of the fact that she was proven right by a lot of her detractors, and on the other, saying, you can't say that just because of who you are.

Stephanie Kirk

Right? And I think she's a feminist hero to people like me, but she would never have conceived of herself as such. And she does talk a little bit in the resuesta about how. How, you know, women should be able to access knowledge, but I don't think she was taking up a cause. I don't think she was trying to get knowledge for all women.

She was very specific about what she had done and the difficulties that she had had and how she did think that women should learn if they were given the right circumstances. And she talks very specifically about, like, an older lady who should, you know, support her learning. And, you know, that would be the most appropriate way to do it. It shouldn't, obviously, be a man and things like that. But she's not trying to advocate for education for everyone.

I mean, she's quite specific about how some of the nuns that surround her are annoying because they just want to chatter and gossip and make all kinds of noise when she's trying to work at her books. She's very much thinking about her own path. And so I think those people who have a different, those scholars who have a different idea of what Sor Juana was and think that people like me way too interested in gender. But I'm not saying she was a feminist. I'm never saying that.

I'm also not saying she wasn't an observant nun. She was a very observant nun. There was no scandal about how she lived her life. She just wanted to write and study. But not even the sort of scandalous, I mean, if you look at her library and the books that she used as reference books, they were all books that were allowed.

I mean, she was basically a Jesuit in a women's convent. I mean, in the sense that nothing she did was particularly or some of the Jesuits were probably more scandalous than she was in terms of the pushing at the boundaries of knowledge. The only boundaries she pushed at were the ones that said she couldn't be studious and she couldn't be a writer. Well, so I'd like to talk a little bit about the end game with her, because la expressta was kind of the thing, I think, that damned her the most. Why was it so damning for her?

Adrian Dustin Munoz

And what was the response from the catholic church? That's a good question. Why was it so damning for her? And really, what was the response? And I think I have to add in here, what was the response?

Stephanie Kirk

What has been the response from critics and scholars? Because that's a whole other beef in and of itself. So she wrote this, I think. I mean, it's very obvious why she wrote it, first of all, to explain why she had written the sermon or the refutation of the sermon, why she had written this theological exegesis wire being published without her permission. And she makes that very clear.

But she tries, in the west western. I think she succeeds to contextualize the work that she has done, the writing she has done. She talks about how she's written poems not through choice, but kind of in her role as a court poet because she was very attached to the vice regal court and how that people have requested that she writes poems, which is very typical for a kind of court poetry. She talks very specifically about how God has given her the desire for knowledge and how she traces this very specific line. So she's justifying the work that she's done.

And the other thing that she does that I think is really interesting is that she talks about the various stages of learning, how theology is like the queen of sciences, but everything else is a preparation for theology, and that theology was the natural next step for her, having had done all these other studies and how you can't just rush into things. And so she's establishing her very careful path to knowledge and also explaining that she wrote plenty of religious texts, but that she also wrote these other texts because she was asked to and because she was. And some of this is maybe slightly disingenuous, I think that she's protecting herself and maybe overstating the fact that she didn't enjoy writing the poetry that she did. I mean, she's an incredibly gifted poet, and so those are the stakes, and this is the way she defends herself. Now, there's been a couple of other finds of letters in the last 15 years, and including this letter, which has been called the Carta de Puebla, the letter of Puebla from Puebla, or the Pueblano letter, which is a reply from Sorfilotea, this time using his own name, in which he engages with Louis Cuesta, not point by point, but talks about her learning, talks about how she should dedicate herself to theology.

But this mystical theology, which is very much in vogue in the Catholic Church at that time. And some scholars have taken this letter, this discovery, which was around 2010, I think, to say that the church never had a beef with her, the church never tried to stop her from learning. But that's not how I see it at all in any way, shape or form. I think that it's more of the same. It's more of the stay in your lane stuff.

It's the more of just what you have done was wrong. Only stick to this kind of religious stuff. As I understand, one of her reactions to that was, though it comes in the guise of council, it will, for me, have the authority of a precept. It's this higher up saying, oh, you know, you really should almost like implying, like, oh, it's a suggestion. You really should stick to this, this and this, when in reality, I mean, that's a commandment.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

I mean, she can't dispose of you. No. And I think what we have to take from this is, see that there was further dialogue after the respuejta, which initially, for many years, we didn't think there was. So there was further dialogue. There's a couple of letters, this one, and there's a fragment of another one.

Stephanie Kirk

But for me, they don't really change anything. They just say he's doubling down. He's saying more of the same. He mentions Saint Gertrude, who she had mentioned, and he says, well, you know, Saint Gertrude did the wrong kind of learning, too, but then she learned her lesson, and she went to the right kind of learning. So, you know, it is very much doubling down.

Even though some scholars would have it, that it's actually a radical rethinking of the relationship. I think she definitely took it as a. As a precept, as definitely took it as a requirement. Although, again, we've been finding out a few more things over the years. Fragments of things that she had written.

Continued to write. She continued to write profane poetry. And profane, I mean, not religious. I don't think the content was particularly profane. But she continued to write secular poetry.

She had a few books here and there. So there is definitely some nuance to be had about what the church was able to do to her. But they definitely came down hard on her and told her to stop doing what she was doing. There's no doubt in my mind here. Some scholars, one particular in Mexico, who was very keen that she be seen as following voluntarily their wishes and doing what they wanted her to do, and doing it out of her own orthodoxy.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

From the evidence that Abraham. They took away her musical instruments, they took away her library, they had her sign this confession. I would very much love to talk about your paper discussing pain as a gendered construct, especially as she signed her confession in blood. But there were two things I wanted to cover. One was pain as a gendered construct in the blood.

The other was, you mentioned that there is some dissent among scholars, but that it sometimes lacks civility and that you yourself have been subject to a little bit of. It's not what you say, it's who you are when you say it. Sort of gender imbalances in your views. Could you speak about that a little bit? So the mexican scholar that I talked about, he's basically argued with everybody, and everybody's interpretations of the church as being a repressive force against her.

Stephanie Kirk

He feels that that's a misunderstanding or a radical misinterpretation, and in my case, and I'm not unique in this, but he has engaged with my writing as I'm engaged with his. But he feels very strongly that my identity as a women's studies adjacent professor or somebody who works on gender is blinding me to the true fact. So he feels that a feminist, what he calls a kind of anachronist feminist reading of Sorkwana, comes from my identity as an american, which I'm not, but an american gender studies professor. And he actually wrote this hilarious blog post. So it was an article I can't really remember, in which he.

I'm affiliated with our women and gender studies department, but I'm not a member of the gender, women and gender. And he wrote this deep dive into the origins of the women and gender studies department at Washington University to show how all these things had happened to create me, who then went on to dispute, you know, these readings of Sor Juana, which I thought was really quite extraordinary, deep dive into something and a radical misunderstanding of who I am and where I'm coming from. And, you know, there's all kinds of dissent among scholars. You know, we love arguing about all kinds of things, and, you know, it's that whole stakes are so low in academia idea. But I don't even see these new texts that he has brought to light as being anything really different, as showing anything really different than what, you know, maybe adding a little bit of nuance in the sense that there's more back and forth between sorfilotea and sor Juana after the reply.

But to me, it's just more of the same. So the beefs go on. It's interesting, there's these contentious relationships between Sorkuana and the church, and then in the 20th and 21st century, you've got all kinds of arguments amongst scholars, but this particular one is probably the most contentious, in which the idea that if you are a female scholar working on gender in the north american academy, you don't really have the right to do this interpretive work. Although he does critique other mexican scholars. Too, it seems, surprise, surprise.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Again, hypocritical, that he should claim, oh, you are not of this ethnicity, therefore, you cannot comment on this. And yet he is not of that gender, therefore, how can he have done that? That seems somewhat hypocritical. And again, it seems like your argument with him is academic, and his possibility may be seen as a little bit more than that. I mean, I think it's a debate.

Stephanie Kirk

It's a debate among scholars around ideas and interpretation. Right. I mean, it's how we're reading these texts, how we're reading her work, how we're reading the situation. I'm very carefully contextualizing. I don't take feminist theory from the 21st century and apply it to Sor Juana.

I think very carefully about the circumstances of women in this period of time to make these kinds of judgments. And I've spent an enormous amount of time in my career doing this. And so I feel that I have definitely took him to task in my book on the question of the interpretation, but there was no engagement on my part of his identity. This is not a question of identity politics for me. This is a question of ideas and interpretation.

So, yeah, and then you asked about my reading of pain and knowledge in Solana, which is something I'm really interested in, because one of the acceptable ways for women to show piety was through bodily mortification. So the idea that men also did it, but women were encouraged in this type of kind of catholic fervor to mortify their bodies as a way of showing piety. And it's the idea of the body as being just a vessel, and the body can be mortified and mistreated. And there's a lot of work from other nuns where they talk in great and explicit and really gruesome detail about the kind of bodily privations through diet, through mortification, through lying on spikes and wearing hair shirts. And we're being led to believe that Sor Juana did this at the end of her life, that she did engage in these kind of bodily privations.

And this is her spanish biographer, who talks about this as well as a couple of other sources. But I think she had a different interest in pain, because one of the ways that men could show piety, Jesuits, for example, was through study and through attainment of knowledge. And so I think she's kind of collapsing these two ideas a little bit. That's why she's so interested in Lucretia, in Catherine of Alexandria, of this question of martyrdom or suffering, the suffering body as a way of accessing knowledge, like martyrdom, as a way to secure knowledge, which is what Jesuits were. You know, they were very interested in the question of martyrdom as a way to attain christian exemplarity.

So I think she pursues these avenues of thought, focusing on women in history and religion who had these experiences, who as a way of attaining perfect knowledge, but not as a way of mortifying the body, because the mortifying the body in the way that nuns did was very much at the behest and supervision of a confessor. There was always a man involved saying, yes, it's okay for you to do this, but she's saying, I'm doing this through my poetry, exploring these ideas very independently that don't have the same goal in mind. This is not a way of dumbing down the spirit. This is a way of elevating the intellect. So then, in that act of.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

As a bit of mortification, in signing the worst of all in her blood, was that the ultimate submission, then it could be both. I mean, like, I would venture to guess that this could be a way of demonstrating knowledge, you know, if you do the kind of reading that I've done of the body and how maybe this was a way that she was without books, without writing, able to use her body in a way that made sense for her because of the way she'd always looked at these things throughout her writing career. I don't see it as a capitulation to the church. You know, I will damn the body to kind of show submission. I think it's more complicated than that.

Stephanie Kirk

I think this is her using her body as a kind of laboratory to think through experiences of knowledge, through bodily privation. I think it's very different. I mean, it's quite hard, I think, for people to understand the difference. But I'm definitely positing that this is a way for her to think about knowledge and access to knowledge rather than submission to the church. How would you contextualize Sona's impact, and why was she so important?

I often think of, why is sort Juana so important? I often think about the analogy to Shakespeare, which is not a perfect one, but has an english schoolchild who's imbued in Shakespeare. You know, you're reading all the plays, you know, I mean, you just can't get away from it. This is sort on Mexico's version. Like, she's on the banknotes, she's everywhere, like, she's memed repeatedly.

There's telenovelas made about her. A really amazing one that was on Netflix, that there's no longer on Netflix, which is just really upsetting because I loved showing it to my students. But it's this once in a lifetime talent that comes along. Their writing is just so different. Their writing makes all these human connections.

There's so many things that she said that, you know, it's like Shakespeare passing into, like, there are phrases that you can just pass into that are in the language or things we think about that come from her. Every mexican school child learns this poem, hombres nefios foolish man, which is an amazing poem that I study with my students, and they're like, this is still existing. She basically says men are crazy because they want women to sleep with them. They want what they can get from women. But if a woman sleeps with them, then she's tarnished goods.

And so now I don't want her. She has these ideas that are before her time around love and sex and basic human instincts. Her poetry on love talks about so many things that are so identifiable for us. And so I think of her in those terms as someone who was a product of her age but exceeds her age in so many ways because her poetry and her plays still have so much resonance. There are so many ideas contained in there that we can identify with.

You know, I think there's a lot of english only bias in the way she's not known more. I mean, this is an outstanding poet, but we don't like reading in translation. You know, this is foreign. I mean, I'm not. There are plenty of people who do read in translation, but she's not widely read because, and there are some spectacular translations out there.

Edith Grossman, who sadly just left us, who was an amazing translator from Spanish, did some stunning translations of the poetry that are very lively and very contemporary sounding. And I would recommend to anyone who likes poetry to pick them up, she's just a fascinating person. How did this woman write in this incredible way that has so much resonance in the contemporary era and as a cloistered nun in kind of a really sort of restrictive period of catholic absolutism. There'S one last thought I wanted to ask you. This is definitely speculative, but you are an expert because she was censored by the church, and that was the reason for her confession.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

Do you think that sort, Juana ever actually imagined that 300 some odd years later, her texts would still be not only read but celebrated? That's a really interesting question, because she talks a lot about fame and how fame kind of pursued her and how she was pursued by fame, how fame really was like something that bothered her because so she was incredibly famous in her lifetime. So it's possible that she would, and I don't think she was necessarily modest. I think that's absolutely fine. I mean, she.

Stephanie Kirk

I think she recognized the level of her singularity, her distinctiveness, her genius. And she talks a lot about it a lot. I mean, she talks about it in terms of a gift from God, so. And I think she genuinely understood it in those terms. That's not disingenuous.

This is really her believing this is a gift from God. So perhaps she did think about the question of posterity, that this would speak to later generations because she recognized the level of her fame and her talent. Wonderful. Thank you so much. This has been such an enlightening conversation.

Adrian Dustin Munoz

We hit half of what I wanted to discuss with you. But I do want you to know we really appreciate your time. Yeah, my pleasure. I am thrilled, thrilled and so surprised the opportunity to talk about this when it's something that I talk about with the other five people who like to talk about it too. Incredibly fun for me.

Me as well, me as well. Thanks so much for the invitation to chat.

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