The Body as Text and Author

Sor Juana lived in a body encoded with meanings not of her choosing: female (meaning subordinate), American-born (meaning inferior to Spanish), illegitimate (meaning shameful). Yet she became an author—of poems, plays, theological treatises—who rewrote the meanings assigned to her. She demonstrated that while your body arrives marked by others' interpretations, you are not merely a text to be read. You are also an author, capable of generating new meanings, asserting new truths, and refusing interpretations that diminish you. This concept invites practitioners to examine which meanings they have internalized about their physical self without choosing them, and which new meanings they can author. Physical self-concept becomes an active practice: noticing the scripts written on your body by culture, power, and history, while simultaneously claiming your authority to interpret and reinvent yourself.