Embodied Responsibility Across Borders

Sor Juana wrote about the lived, embodied experience of intellectual life—the physical reality of studying late into night, of bodily constraints imposed by gender and confinement. She refused abstractions divorced from lived experience. Climate justice similarly demands recognizing embodied harm: real people's lungs damaged by air pollution, bodies displaced by rising seas, communities facing malnutrition as agricultural collapse spreads. Global responsibility becomes meaningful when we acknowledge the specific, corporeal suffering of individuals in communities facing climate catastrophe. Sor Juana's life in Mexico, constrained by colonial structures, demonstrates how abstractions about knowledge hide concrete impacts on actual lives. Contemporary climate discourse often treats distant impacts as statistics; embodied responsibility demands we recognize climate change as present, visceral harm. This means Western consumers acknowledging factory workers manufacturing goods under polluting conditions, wealthy nations recognizing climate refugees fleeing uninhabitable regions they harmed, wealthy individuals understanding their consumption's bodily impact on distant others. Responsibility becomes real when we move from statistics to faces, names, and bodies affected.