Week 4, Aysha Bagchi, Annotated Bibliography

Primary Source:

Lieutenant Nun by Catalina de Erauso

See post from last week if you need details: http://travelers209s.blogspot.com/2011/04/week-3-aysha-bagchi-primary-source.html

Secondary Sources:

Forward to Lieutenant Nun by Marjorie Garber

Garber discusses various critical analyses of Erauso’s book, biographical details on Erauso’s life beyond those in the book, and particularly the notion of crossings literal and figurative borders in Lieutenant Nun. These include crossings between gender identities and nationality as well as tensions between Old and New World, between Indians and “Spaniards”, between purebreds and “half-breeds”, and between the merchant class and the nobility.

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety by Marjorie Garber

Garber describes the literary and cultural phenomenon she calls a “category crisis” and a related manifestation she calls the “transvestite effect.” A category crisis is a failure of definition distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, permitting border crossings from one apparently distinct category to another. She suggests that what seems like a binary opposition, a clear choice between opposites that define cultural boundaries, is revealed to be not only a construct but also—more disturbingly—a construct that no longer works to contain and delimit meaning. Examples pertinent to Catalina’s story might include male/female, black/white, gay/straight, Christian/Indian, Christian/cannibal, Old World/New World, master/servant, and master/slave. She suggests that the appearance of a transvestite figure in a text was almost invariably a sign of a category crisis elsewhere: not, or not only, in the realms of gender and sexuality, but also, and equally importantly, in registers like politics, economics, history, and literary genre. These transvestite figures mark the narratives in which they appear as narratives of a world under conceptual stress. And the more extraneous the fact of cross-dressing appears to be to the story the text seems to be telling, the more critical the “crisis” of category, the more blurred the boundary that is being, apparently, policed.

In Search of Catalina de Erauso: The National ad Sexual Identity of the Lieutenant Nun by Eva Mendieta

Mendieta’s books aims to answer the question, “Who was Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun?”. Medieta explores the different facets of Erauso’s persona, from her sexual identity to the factors which determined her choice of gender roles to her Basque origin and its impact on her life and self-image.

The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso by Sherry Velasco

Velasco’s book analyzes the various ways in which Catalina de Erauso has been constructed, interpreted, marketed, and consumed by the dominant culture and divergent audience groups from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Velasco investigates the cultural function of transvestite narratives through an analysis of the Lieutenant Nun figure presented in literary, theatrical, iconographic, and cinematic adaptations during nearly four hundred years in Spain, England, Latin America, and North America. Velasco argues that the ways in which Erauso’s experience has been transformed into a public spectacle help explain the enduring popularity and economic success of transgender narratives as well as how they expose and manipulate spectator’s fears and desires. Her book explores what happens when the private experience of the transgenderist is shifted to the public sphere and thereby marketed as a hybrid spectacle for the curious gaze of the general audience.

For my research, I will primarily be drawing on the first two chapters of Velasco’s 4-chapter book. The first chapter, Hybrid Spectacles: Lesbian Desire, Monsters, and Masculine Women in Early Modern Spain contextualizes the reception and interpretation of transgenderism during the life of Catalina de Erauso. Velasco argues that the Lieutenant Nun’s popularity during the seventeenth century was a response to the marketability of female transvestism in history, literature, and theater, justified by the need or desire for self-protection in terms of chastity and safety, escapism, adventure, patriotism, the support of patriarchy, romantic and economic motives, and the sex appeal of the revealing garments.

In the second chapter, Celebrity and Scandal: The Creation of the Lieutenant Nun in the Seventeenth Century, Velasco provides an analysis of the different versions of Erauso’s life presented between 1618 and 1653 in legal petitions, testimonies, letters, news pamphlets, her autobiography, an episode from a picaresque novel, literary and iconographic portraits, and a play. Velasco suggests that the presentation of Erauso’s lesbian desire in her book facilitated official and public approval of her transgenderism: she refrained from heterosexual relations while participating in Spain’s project of empire-building. Moreover, the association of her vices with homosexual desire ensured that her personal life would not become an acceptable model for future women.

The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain by Nerea Aresti

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00491.x/full

This article analyses the story of Catalina de Erauso, a Spanish nun, who escaped from a convent at the beginning of the seventeenth century to begin a new life as a military warrior serving under the King of Spain in colonial Latin America. Drawing from her story, Aresti argues that notions of sex and gender at the time were surprisingly elastic and flexible, and often more associated with acts and behaviour than with physical bodies. By examining how the personage of the Lieutenant Nun has been treated in Spain and in Britain in the nineteenth century, she also evaluates the extent to which certain pre-modern ideas about sex and gender continued to survive two centuries later. Aresti argues that the importance of gender in the construction of individual identity is shifting and relative.