Catalina De Erauso's Autobiography

In this paper I will explore Catalina de Erauso's autobiography - the story of a seventeenth-century Basque nun turned soldier of fortune - using the methodology of Queer Theory. Originating with Michel Foucault, Queer Theory studies the ways in which alternate sexualities are clinicized, stigmatized, and presented as "deviations" in order to reinforce the norm of heterosexuality. Catalina de Erauso's life seems superficially to seriously question heterosexuality, but in her seventeenth-century context, her chosen lifestyle and behavior definitely works to reinforce rather than provide alternatives to heterosexuality.

I. Methodological introduction - Queer Theory

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990

I will be using the methodology of Queer Theory to study Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, the life of Catalina de Erauso. Queer theory is a body of cultural analysis building on the work of Michel Foucault, who argued in his Introduction to the History of Sexuality that, rather than becoming more repressed and secretive about sexuality, Western culture has in the last three hundred years created an enormous discourse about sex. This discourse has served to make sex into a locus of power relations, based on ideas about normalcy and perversion. In light of this discourse, sexuality is not a "natural" category but a social one:

Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of neccessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it . . . It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power. (Foucault 103)

The result of this discourse has been to transfer sexuality from activities to identities -- that is, a person no longer practices sodomy but is identified as a homosexual: first by doctors and psychologists, as a category of illness, and later by the individual, as a matter of pride and personal identity. (In much the same way, the term "queer" has developed from a pejorative or euphemistic term for homosexuality into a term of pride and a shorthand for an entire cultural perspective.)

Monique Wittig, "One Is Not Born a Woman." In Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993)

Queer theorists in the late twentieth century have developed new frameworks for thinking about sexuality, based on the premise that in every age, sexuality (including sexual activity, gender roles and sexual identity) is not natural but constructed. Lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, among others, extended the idea of sexual construction from the social to the political and economic arenas: in her view, heterosexuality not only orders society but is one of the ways in which women are actively oppressed. She writes that "the category 'woman' as well as the category 'man' are political and economic categories, not eternal ones." (Wittig 106)

Wittig's work follows Foucault's, and both would agree that heterosexuality in the modern world is a political and economic system of power relations. Because heterosexuality (as an institution) takes its power from enforcing a definition of normalcy, "perversions" or aberrations from the norm might be read as resistance or subversion. Foucault would argue that the very construction of queer identities is a function of the power system, and that self-consciously constructing oneself as a lesbian simply reifies the clinical category of "lesbian" that was originally constructed as a way to enforce heterosexual femininity. Wittig seems to acknowledge that, since homosexual identities were first constructed as a means of oppression, using them in the name of resistance can be difficult. She argues, however, that since lesbians have historically been derided (and persecuted) as "unwomanly," the identity of lesbian offers the only real escape from the heterosexual power system.

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) Marjorie Garber, a queer theorist who studies transvestitism, follows Wittig's argument in a more academic, less personal/political mode. Garber writes that "cross-dressing . . . offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of 'female' and 'male,' whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural." (Garber 10) She describes how the transvestite has often been described in terms of a "third sex," and goes on to discuss the analytical power of the third, in a binary system:

The third is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge. . . . [the third] reconfigures the relationships between the original pair, and puts into question identities previously conceived as stable, unchallengeable, grounded, and "known." (Garber 13)

Summarizing the work of Foucault, Wittig, and Garber, then, we understand gender and sexuality as a system of constructions, which create unequal balances of social, economic and political power between different people -- differences which are then naturalized as individual "identitities." In the context of oppression, however, those identities can be used as locations of resistance or subversion. I hope to use these theories to understand the cultural and political meaning of the life of Catalina de Erauso, the seventeenth-century Basque nun turned conquistador and hellraiser. Erauso's autobiography provides a unique opportunity to expore whether these theories about the meanings and uses of gender identity have meaning in the pre-modern era. In particular, I am interested in the extent to which Erauso's actions are subversive of heterosexuality.

Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." in Abelove, Barale, and Helperin, eds, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

Queer theory holds a personal interest for me, stemming from the day that I read Adrienne Rich's article on "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." On first reading I was alternately intrigued, baffled and incensed by what I read. Rich discussed the ways in which heterosexuality operates more as a tool of oppression than a natural expression of the biological ways men and women interact. Her theoretical position posed a challenge to my own identity as a