The Economics of Time and Attention

Sor Juana had convent hours protected for study and writing; most women of her era worked continuously. This concept examines how privilege operates through control of time itself. Who gets to think? Who must labor? Who can afford distraction by abstract questions? Educational and intellectual privilege assumes prior privilege: someone else is doing the work that feeds, clothes, and maintains you. Acknowledging this means recognizing the invisible labor subsidizing your intellectual freedom. For scholars, artists, and knowledge workers, this becomes urgent: whose unpaid labor makes your paid thinking possible? Whose domestic work creates your study time? Whose service industry labor funds your university position? Sor Juana's letters reveal acute awareness of her dependence on institutional structures that fed her so she could write. Modern acknowledgment of this privilege requires examining supply chains of survival, admitting that knowledge work is not actually meritocratic when only those whose basic survival is guaranteed can afford to pursue it. The practice involves using time-privilege responsibly: for work that serves justice, for mentoring those without protected time, for creating space for others' intellectual labor.