Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Feminist reconstruction of biography and text

This dissertation analyzes two texts by seventeenth-century humanist scholar and theologian Sor Juana Ines la Cruz: El Primero Sueno (The First Dream) and La Respuesta (The Answer). For biographical information, much of the Sorjuanista literature focuses on the latter primary text that she wrote in the first person in 1691. It is in this context that I will analyze gender discrimination that Sor Juana experienced at each stage in her life. This includes her life as a young girl in a family comprised of seven women; as a young lady-in-waiting in thee-regal court of the Marquise and Marquis de Mancera; and as a nun in the convent of Santa Paula. For this dissertation, La Respuesta is a starting point for reconstructing a more holistic biographical account of Sor Juana's evolving awareness of gender and racial discrimination as experienced in all three stages of her life. It is distinctive in its attempt to reconstruct a nuanced autobiographical account of Sor Juana's life-long sensitivity to inequalities between the sexes and between Spaniards and non-Spaniards in her seventeenth-century paternalistic New Spain world. Using feminist historical and liberationist methodologies defined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether, I reconstruct Sor Juana's evolving awareness of sexism in the Church and mine her texts for liberatory resources for a twenty-first century Latina Liberation Christian ecclesiology for a renewed church and world..