Daliya
I guess since that is a plate from the 16th century it’s about the idea of evil as not just being itself a mixture of cloven hooved animal and woman (ie the thing that exists in between states) but also in addition to the animal the idea that a feminine marker referenced the fact that women’s bodies were constructed as dangerously permeable themselves and in an in between state of flux - ruled by nature not reason so essentially untrustworthy and thus the justification of their subordination within society was that they were inherently transgressive to the economic and social order (which of course their full participation was).
I don’t know much about early church history but the study of mysticism and a certain kind of embodied female relationship to god that actually took what was deemed so threatening to the church and used it to bypass church authority (intense spiritual sexual encounters with god, menstrual blood/stigmata, celibate devotion to god, visions of giving birth to the christ child etc) is really interesting.
Here are a couple of books: Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Wounds of Love The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima
And here is a cool website about Sor Juana who was I think one of the definitions of bad ass woman, also poet.
Thank you. :)
