Epistemic Justice and Named Authority

Sor Juana was silenced not because her logic was flawed but because a woman claiming intellectual authority violated colonial patriarchal hierarchies. Epistemic justice means recognizing someone's right to be heard, to be believed, to be accepted as authoritative about their own knowledge, experience, and identity. Across cultures, this is structurally denied: indigenous peoples' ecological knowledge dismissed by Western science, women's lived experience ignored by male authorities, postcolonial subjects' self-understanding overwritten by colonial narratives. Your name and identity are connected to whether others grant you epistemic authority—the power to speak truth and be heard. Sor Juana's legacy insists on this connection: she demanded recognition not just as a person but as a knower, a thinker, an authority on theology, philosophy, and literature. For name and identity across cultures, this means fighting for the right to name your own reality, interpret your own experience, and be recognized as an expert on your own life and knowledge. Epistemic justice is not abstract philosophy—it determines whose names appear in academic citations, whose cultural practices are validated, whose identity claims are honored.