Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Following the Traces: Reassessing the Status Quo, Reinscribing Trans and Genderqueer Realities
- Peripheral Vision(s): Objects, Images, and Identities
- Genre, Gender, and Trans Textualities
- Epilogue: Beyond Binaries: A Reflection on the (Trans) Gender(s) of Saints
- Appendix: Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide
- Index
3 - Juana de la Cruz: Gender-Transcendent Prophetess
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Following the Traces: Reassessing the Status Quo, Reinscribing Trans and Genderqueer Realities
- Peripheral Vision(s): Objects, Images, and Identities
- Genre, Gender, and Trans Textualities
- Epilogue: Beyond Binaries: A Reflection on the (Trans) Gender(s) of Saints
- Appendix: Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Interest in Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534) has increased since the publication of her sermons in 1999 by Inocente García de Andrés and the re-opening of her cause for canonization by the Vatican in 2015. As a woman preaching sermons during the Inquisition, Mother Juana is a highly unusual figure, all the more so given that gender liminality pervades her thought. Gender fluidity is also a theme in her personal biography. This chapter examines gender liminality in her Vida and in her sermon on the Annunciation. Where gender liminality might seem novel and untraditional, Juana's use of this theme is contextualized and shown to be contiguous both with earlier hagiographic sources and with her professed Franciscan heritage.
Keywords: Franciscan, sermons, liminality, Hispanic mysticism, Mother Juana de la Cruz
Mother Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534) offers a medieval model for modern LGBTQ people, exemplifying radical authenticity to the queer and holy truth of her own identity. Juana's gender combined masculinity and femininity, and she proclaimed the presence of God she found inherent in that identity. Her sermons invited her listeners, too, to discover God in their own experiences of gender. Juana called on her audience to experience the divine through gender fluidity; gender non-conforming images of God, the saints, the Virgin and Christ are found throughout her sermons. When she told the story of her own re-gendering by God at her conception, she spoke the truth revealed to her of the gender transcendence she lived out in the authenticity of her life. Pointing to her Adam's apple as proof of this miracle, Juana also pointed to the source of her own miraculous and authentic voice, which is simultaneously both her own voice and the voice of Christ.
Juana was born in 1481 to farming parents in the village of Numancia, halfway between Madrid and Toledo. Contrary to the gender expectations of her day, she grew to fame for her sermons, whose echoes would reach the New World as her Sisters carried her relics and fame to the Americas and beyond. Entering a Franciscan community of women as a teenager, she took the name Juana de la Cruz, eventually becoming the community's abbess. For centuries Mother Juana has been celebrated in Spain as ‘la Santa Juana’, but more recently she has gained scholarly attention due to the abundant gender theology of her sermons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography , pp. 87 - 108Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021