Finger-pointing (Painting) in Neuter: The Deixis of Portraiture in the Third-person Lyric of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

The figurative pointing and painting in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poetry create unique intersections of voice, person and gender whence lyric in the neuter or third person may speak. This paper follows her use of deixis (from the epideictic tradition), the gesture of pointing at and describing a person or an object, as a way to trace her subjectivity to the point of origin for the invective or praise, while exploring her navigation of the third and first persons within that tradition. Though the lyric traditionally operates on the first-person/ second-person dialectic, Sor Juana's productive use of the epideictic in her lyric poems opens a space for the neuter, or ternary logic, in a genre dominated by male subjectivity.