Copying and Conjugation: Lesbian Autohistoriography as Reproduction in Alicia Gaspar de Albas Sor Juana's Second Dream

Abstract:In her biographical novel, Sor Juana's Second Dream (1999), Chicana writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba formulates a counternarrative to readings that have concentrated on the rise of the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-95) as a criolla intellectual while downplaying or effacing her identity as a woman who loved women. Using a self-referential genre that may be termed "lesbian autohistoriography," Gaspar de Alba re-creates the historical figure as a symbolic foremother of contemporary Chicana lesbians' ongoing struggles for legitimacy and voice among heteropatriarchal institutions such as the Catholic Church. Sor Juana emerges as a passionate protofeminist artist whose intellectual ascent countered the misogynistic social restrictions of her time. This analysis harnesses the trope and semiotics of reproduction (in particular, copying and conjugation) to illuminate the need for a wider spectrum of creative choices for women beyond biological motherhood. Consolidating critical interventions by such contemporary Latina feminists as Emma Pérez, I argue that Gaspar de Alba's version of Sor Juana strips reproduction of its exclusively heterosexual underpinnings and offers a lesbian hermeneutics of selfhood that recalibrates and diversifies women's hard-earned right to create, coexist, and resist concurrently.