ABSTRACT
This chapter applies four categories applicable to early modern thought, concerning Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's anti-misogynist, pro-woman discursive strategies: querelle des femmes, spiritual-matriarchal, courtly, and Sapphist feminisms. Ongoing scholarship illuminates these directions in Sor Juana's texts, revealing coherence in apparent contradictions. Employing strengths within subordination, she enlists secular humanist strategies, doctrines, and genres from her religious context and female allegiances, idealized precursors, and pragmatically invoked powerful women she knows. Incisive analyses took up the Respuesta to move discussion of Sor Juana's feminism beyond theme into discursive and then stylistic dimensions. Diverse settings nurtured Sor Juana's pervasively woman-identified consciousness. Sor Juana famously summons female predecessors as advocates for women. Nina Scott ("La gran turba") examines the list of forty-two illustrious "Foremothers" in the Respuesta, a catalogue of exempla renowned for intelligence and power, and characteristic of pro-feminist querelle texts, which argue by precedent for women's rational and moral prowess.
