Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Hortense Spillers on the Circulation of Power

• In Event: Women In and Out of Power

Abstract

At first, the notion of enclosure seems only to connote the eradication or minimization of power. However, in this paper, focusing on the material and metaphorical sites of the kitchen and the egg, I shift the attention on power as something to be concentrated and expanded to something that circulates and can exist and/or be collapsed in practices of imitation. Prompted by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's “Letter to Sor Philotea” and in conversation with Hortense Spillers’ essay “Peter’s Pans: Eating in the Diaspora” and her treatment of the egg as a window into both the experience of circulation and mimicry, I argue for the treatment and experience in the kitchen of the egg as both prime and ancillary matter, as itself a whole and whole-creating, and also a part made of parts. Through this treatment and experience, I propose an alternative conception of circulatory power.

Against the backdrop of Foucault's notion of the flows of power, I offer a conception of circulatory power which emerges from the closed spaces where women and servants have been historically relegated. I expand on Joan Kelly-Gadol’s historiographic challenge from her paradigmatic essay, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" (1977). Kelly-Gadol was one of the first historians to question the accepted scheme of the periodization of the Renaissance as a progressive moment. As she argued, the developments that have usually been taken to further the historical development of men—the consolidation of genuine states, the mercantile and manufacturing economy that supported them, the restructuring of the urban and domestic space, and its working out of post-feudal and post-guild relations—overall, adversely affected women. I thus work on the practices of imitation that make circulatory power possible by centering a historically spatial-political margin.

Author

• Tessy Schlosser, Cornell University