Traveling women as spectacle: vision, performance, and female subjectivity in the early modern Hispanic world

[摘要] This dissertation examines narratives of early modern women travelers and the spectacles these women produced as a strategy to negotiate gender paradigms that aimed to silence and immobilize women. In María de Zayas's short novel 'La esclava de su amante (1647), the protagonist's journey to North Africa gives her the tools she needs to publically address her rape. Historia de la Monja Alférez (c. 1626) is the autobiography of Catalina de Erauso, whose constant movement on both sides of the Atlantic allows her to construct a spectacle of hybridity that both entertains her audiences and authorizes her many transgressions. Finally, Viaje de cinco religiosas capuchinas de Madrid a Lima (1722) highlights the masses of people who clamor to catch a glimpse of the itinerant nuns, creating a spectacle that reaffirms the women's importance in the social hierarchy of the Spanish Kingdom. In these three baroque texts, I highlight the construction of the female traveler's body and the suffering it endures while crossing great distances. I examine the ways in which each text reimagines or reorganizes the traveler's social relationships and her place in early modern Hispanic society. Through an analysis of spectacle based on the mediation of these relationships, I interrogate the image of women travelers and the power that image has to push back against a gendered social hierarchy.

[发布机构] University of Iowa