Epistemic Justice in Parental Testimony

Sor Juana's writings were routinely dismissed, reinterpreted, or attributed to male mentors. Her knowledge of theology, philosophy, and her own experience was deemed unreliable by authorities who deemed her testimony suspect due to her sex and status. Parents, especially mothers, face similar epistemic injustice: their knowledge about the complexities of parenting is dismissed as bias, emotion, or selfishness if it includes accounts of loss, resentment, or unmet needs. Society prefers the sanitized narrative of parental fulfillment to the testimony of parents themselves. This concept, grounded in Sor Juana's fight for intellectual credibility, demands epistemic justice: that parents be recognized as knowers of their own experience, that their testimony about what parenting costs be believed, and that their analysis of parental identity be valued as legitimate knowledge. When parents can testify truthfully about losses without being pathologized, parental identity becomes knowable and real.