Los muladares y las mujeres: Subaltern Spaces of Self-Abjection in the Spiritual Diary of Úrsula de Jesús.

The saliva of the worthless sinner, the kitchen-like boiling of souls in Hell, the ferocious mouth of a dragon: the spiritual diary of Úrsula de Jesús illuminates interior spaces as varied as they are fantastic and terrifying. Spanning the years 1650–1661, the Afro-Peruvian donada 's divine encounters in Lima's Convent of Santa Clara make exterior and visible the interior, invisible portions of Úrsula's context even as her story is mediated by a palimpsest of the nuns who recorded her visions. In dialogue with Kristeva's "abject" and Spivak's "subaltern," this article argues that Úrsula's spiritual diary can be seen to fashion a space of the spiritually abject, a space that dissolves boundaries between self and world even as its plurivocal form and subaltern subject complicate the idea of the literary abject itself. At the intersection of psychoanalytic and subaltern discourse, Úrsula's self-abjection gives voice to such currents in her narrative. The saliva of the worthless sinner, the kitchen-like boiling of souls in Hell, the ferocious mouth of a dragon: the spiritual diary of Úrsula de Jesús illuminates interior spaces as varied as they are fantastic and terrifying. Spanning the years 1650–1661, the Afro-Peruvian donada's divine encounters in Lima's Convent of Santa Clara make exterior and visible the interior, invisible portions of Úrsula's context even as her story is mediated by a palimpsest of the nuns who recorded her visions. In dialogue with Kristeva's "abject" and Spivak's "subaltern," this article argues that Úrsula's spiritual diary can be seen to fashion a space of the spiritually abject, a space that dissolves boundaries between self and world even as its plurivocal form and subaltern subject complicate the idea of the literary abject itself. At the intersection of psychoanalytic and subaltern discourse, Úrsula's self-abjection gives voice to such currents in her narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]