Sor Juana's Villancicos: Context, Gender, and Genre

Abstract

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the famous 17th-century Mexican nun and writer, successfully constructed and performed her identity as a creole woman in Colonial-era New Spain through her use of the villancico, a type of Spanish lyric. This was possible because the generic conventions, social attitudes, and performance context of this form provided Sor Juana with the optimal "cover" for her somewhat subversive female-centered worldview. Underberg combines considerations of the content of Sor Juana's writings with the cultural and performance context in which they were enacted, a perspective that is relatively lacking in the copious scholarship devoted to the famous nun.