Sor Juana Inèz DE LA CRUZ: Thinking the Querelle des Femmes with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

"Thinking the Querelle des Femmes with Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz" 

The querelle des femmes is a premodern, multilingual, and intertextual literary and cultural tradition populated by texts of diverse genres that describe women’s moral, physical, and intellectual qualities and that work very hard to pre- and proscribe relations between the sexes. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun, poet, and philosopher of the Baroque period, was one of the few and most vociferous women writers to reread and rewrite the tropes of the querelle in Spanish. This title features the idea of thinking with—rather than a traditional scholarly stance of thinking about—Sor Juana and the querelle, in order to invite a reflection on methodological approaches to the querelle and to Sor Juana’s relationships to it, including those of reader, scholar, and adept, and also to highlight how scholars who work on the querelle, Sor Juana included, are faced with continual negotiations between rhetoric and reality, literary representations and historical subjects, between authority and experience.