Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, a podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Irene.

I'm Alice.

And today we're going to be talking to you about Mexican nun, poet, polymath and proto-feminist, Sohuana Inez Delacruz.

Before we start, I'd like to acknowledge the Boon Warong and Wurundari-Woiwurong people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay our respects to their elders past and present.

We recognise them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

Secondly, as you might have noticed today, it's just me and Alice recording.

We're doing a test run of recording online from our different houses because the pandemic continues to happen.

And this is a safer and more legal way for us to bring you a podcast.

To be clear, we have always been bringing you a podcast in a safe and legal way. It just means sometimes you don't get to see, Irene. Your exile is over.

I'd like to do a few content mornings before we start this episode. It will contain mentions of slavery, misogyny, a brief discussion of an epidemic and homophobia in the scholarship.

This episode also contains a poem which has sexual reference and swearing in it.

It's only a single poem, so you should be able to skip that section.

I'll add timestamps in the description.

The other thing I'd like to make a note of is, in spite of it being situated in 17th century, Mexico,

what we don't really discuss are the indigenous peoples of Mexico. This is not because they're

not there. There are indigenous people in Mexico. I just wanted to be clear. It's not that I've

overlooked them. It's that Sohwana's ethnic background is Spanish. Her cultural ties are very much to Spanishness.

And if she interacted much with indigenous people, it doesn't come up a lot in the text.

I just didn't sort of want it to read like an episode where there are just Spanish people in Mexico and that's it.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

In terms of the structure of this episode, we're relatively short on biographical details

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