Epistemic Justice and Knowledge Ownership

Sor Juana faced systematic epistemic injustice: her knowledge was dismissed because she was a woman, her authority as a thinker was delegitimized by gender, and her intellectual labor was absorbed into male-dominated institutions. Epistemic justice demands recognition of her as a legitimate knower with property rights over her own insights. This concept extends beyond mere credit or attribution; it asserts that you own your perspective, your interpretation, your truth-claims about reality. In Libertarian justice, epistemic injustice becomes a violation of property rights at the deepest level—the colonization of consciousness itself. When institutions deny your right to be heard, to interpret your own experience, to claim knowledge as yours, they commit theft of selfhood. Sor Juana's struggle insists that freedom requires the right to assert your own understanding without institutional veto, to own your voice as intellectual property, and to resist epistemic erasure.