Femininity and Monstrosity in the Social Imaginary: A Reading and Two Texts

Abstract

The conceptualization of the feminine, together with its consequent valuations and processes of symbolization, occupies a prominent place within the field of configurations that structures the social imaginary in all periods and societies.

This paper proposes to confront two textualities that are distant in time and yet convergent in their ways of representing the problem of the feminine in discourse. On the one hand, it analyzes two episodes from the Libro de Buen Amor by the Archpriest of Hita, a fourteenth-century Spanish text; on the other, it examines several versions of the “mulánima”, collected in San Salvador de Jujuy in 1997.

Both texts construct images of women by appealing to the figure of the monster. In the first text, a mountain woman, half beast and half human, saves a lost knight from death in exchange for money. In the versions of the “mulánima”, the adulterous woman, after dying, is transformed into a terrifying mule as a result of the damnation of her soul.

The question raised revolves around the deep meanings projected behind the figure of the deformed female body and of a femininity shaped through monstrosity. This question guides the reflections of the paper and is the one to which it seeks to provide an answer.