Canonical Exclusion: The Politics of Being Remembered

Despite her extraordinary achievements, Sor Juana was largely forgotten in her own tradition for centuries, and her work remains less widely taught than that of male contemporaries with lesser intellectual contributions. This historical exclusion reveals how cisgender identity shapes the politics of memory and canon formation. The concept of canonical exclusion matters for examining cisgender identity because it exposes how knowledge systems themselves are gendered—they decide which voices are preserved, which are centered, and which disappear into obscurity. For those examining cisgender identity, Sor Juana's delayed recognition demonstrates that being present in one's own time doesn't guarantee being present in history. The work of retrieval, remembrance, and assertion of intellectual legacy becomes necessary political labor. Understanding how cisgender identity—particularly feminine assignment—affects who gets canonized means recognizing that examining your own cisgender identity requires wrestling with questions of erasure, visibility, and the politics of intellectual inheritance. It means asking who is remembered and why, and whose voices are systematically diminished by structures that claim to be neutral.