Justice as Epistemic Transformation

Sor Juana's insistence on women's intellectual capacity challenged the epistemic injustice of her time—the systematic exclusion of women's voices from knowledge-making. Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice gains particular power through Sor Juana's example: justice is not only about redistributing resources or rights, but about transforming who gets believed and whose knowledge systems are recognized as valid. In intersectional practice, this means actively working to amplify knowledge produced from marginalized positions while naming the systematic discrediting that has occurred. Justice requires credibility shifts—recognizing that those experiencing intersecting oppressions often hold crucial knowledge about how systems actually function. This concept moves beyond asking marginalized people to participate in dominant knowledge systems; it demands those systems change their criteria, their voices, their very foundations. Sor Juana models this by asserting that women's intellectual contributions are not exceptional but essential to any legitimate knowledge project.