The Economics of Intellectual Labor Across Identities

Sor Juana's intellectual labor occurred within a convent partly because that was one of few institutional spaces available to an intelligent woman of her era. She had no salary, no formal position, limited mobility. Intersectionality in practice must attend to the material conditions that shape whose thinking gets developed, whose writing gets published, whose expertise commands fees. This includes recognizing emotional labor, mentoring work, and knowledge production that happens informally and without compensation, disproportionately performed by people with marginalized identities. It means examining who can afford to pursue intellectual work, who must produce knowledge while managing precarious employment, and how institutional structures profit from the unpaid or underpaid intellectual contributions of marginalized groups. In practice, this demands material support—stipends, time, resources—not merely acknowledgment. It requires paying for expertise drawn from lived experience and refusing the extraction of knowledge from communities without reciprocal benefit.