| Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's silences, including her final and mysterious withdrawal from letters, were not empty spaces at all but highly loaded performative resistances to patriarchal control. My work is based on Judith Butler's poststructural theory on performance and subject construction, with support from postcolonial and feminist theories. The approach is a break from the historical and popular gendered discourses that surround her final years, one that explores the loaded gaps and borders that provide liminal spaces for the transcendence of her voice and gender over the ages. I address the research, speculation, and theories that have misread her silences as material, gendered, empty or defeated and that in doing so limit her voice yet again. |
