A look from a gender perspective on female religious life:

the Santa Teresa Convent in Portuguese America

Abstract

In this brief article based on the documentation of the Convent of  Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro, we seek to use the historicity of the gender category, in a dialogue with philosophy, to think about the subjectivity and agency of the cloistered women, not only as isolated people from the world, with fixed and “pre-established” identities, subordinate to male superior religious. It should be noted that even within the walls of the enclosure there was freedom, which despite being permeated by strict rules, sometimes allowed the detachment of strongly socialized singularities. We present the convent as a place of possibilities, in which varied power relations articulated with gender are built. In this way, we seek to break with the essential approach of the universal categories of man and woman, to access women's religious life, experiences of socialization, language and performance of women inserted in Rio de Janeiro society at the end of the 18th century.