Gender & Sexualities

This reference looks at the literature of Spain from the perspective of women's studies.

This fascinating collection is the first to gather together a wide variety of works by Spanish women writers of the Golden Age. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the cloister was a refuge for women with intellectual aspirations.

Women's life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period, both in Spain and in Mexico.

Kristine Ibsen studies women's personal narrative in colonial Spanish America, focusing particularly on the spiritual autobiography of the 17th and 18th centuries and offering revealing insights into the social and political position of cloistered women.  In Spanish American literature, women's autobiography is rooted in the hagiographic tradition of vitae in which, at the request of a confessor, nuns wrote about their spiritual lives in an autobiographical form.

Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about." Her long service fighting for the Spanish empire in Peru and Chile won her a soldier's pension and a papal dispensation to continue dressing in men's clothing.

In this second edition of her acclaimed volume, The Women of Colonial Latin America, Susan Migden Socolow has revised substantial portions of the book - incorporating new topics and illustrative cases that significantly expand topics addressed in the first edition; updating historiography; and adding new material on poor, rural, indigenous and slave women.

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortés in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin," at least, was what the Indians called her. In this study of Malintzin's life, Camilla Townsend rejects all the previous myths and tries to restore dignity to the profoundly human men and women who lived and died in those days. Drawing on Spanish and Aztec language sources, she breathes new life into an old tale, and offers insights into the major issues of conquest and colonization, including technology and violence, resistance and accommodation, gender and power.

Known as the first feminist of the Americas, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great lyric poets and dramatists of her time. While earlier translators have ignored Sor Juana's keen awareness of gender, this volume brings out her own emphasis and diction, and reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and even humor she drew on in defense of her cause.

This is the account of the social and spiritual difficulties of an aspirant nun in Mexico at the end of the seventeenth century. In an extensive introduction, Myers discusses the chronology and provenance of Madre Maria's manuscript and gives biographical details of her life; surveys literaryaspects of the text; and seeks to show the socio-historical value of the striking scenes of family life which the text offers. Notes and guidance are given on style, orthography and pronunciation; and a bibliographical essay complements a selected bibliography.

Madre Maria de San Jose (1656 - 1719)--mystic, chronicler, and co-founder of an Augustinian convent--inscribed her life story within the model of spiritual autobiography set by St. Augustine and Teresa of Avila, but at the same time included her individual story as a seventeenth-century woman of the landowning classes in New Spain.

The life of the black religious servant Ursula de Jesús (1604-1666) has remained one of the best-kept historical secrets of the New World. This English language translation of the diary she began in 1650 allows us to hear the voice of the former slave turned spiritualist.

A vivid and mesmerizing memoir of the six months the author spent in Cuba in 1970, a time when she began to develop her own fervent political conscience.

One of Argentina's 30,000 "disappeared", Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Smuggled out and published anonymously, The Little School is Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment.

In Portuguese

This virtually unknown, insightful account by a highly intelligent, observant and forthright Frenchwoman of her decade-long stay in Brazil during the 1850s provides a remarkable firsthand view of a slaveocrat society.