Stephany Slaughter
Ohio State University
Email: slaughter.44@osu.edu

The Nun Who Rebelled: Re/appropriations of the gaze in La Monja Alférez and She Must Be Seeing Things

This paper studies the use of the gaze by directors of two adaptations of the story of Catalina de Erauso, la monja alférez (the lieutenant nun). Applying the theory of the gaze elaborated by Laura Mulvey in her seminal article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," I examine the manifestation of the masculine gaze in La Monja Alférez directed by Emilio Gómez Muriel and She Must Be Seeing Things directed by Sheila McLaughlin. Emilio Gómez Muriel creates a film that adheres to the classic masculine gaze where the woman is objectified for the voyeuristic pleasure of the spectator. In contrast, Sheila McLaughlin attempts to transform this gaze with a re-signification of typically masculine signs. The recreations of both films reflect ideological messages from two different periods.