Epistemic Justice and Property Rights

Sor Juana's work addresses what modern philosophy calls epistemic injustice: the systematic denial of credibility to women's knowledge and speech. When societies refuse to listen to or credit women's intellectual contributions, they effectively deny women ownership of their own ideas and block their access to economic benefit from knowledge production. Libertarian justice requires epistemic equality—recognition that all persons' testimony, reasoning, and creativity deserve equal standing. Sor Juana fought for the right to have her ideas taken seriously, not patronized or dismissed. This connects directly to property because knowledge is property, and epistemic marginalization is a form of dispossession. When women's intellectual output is attributed to men, stolen, or rendered invisible, their property is literally taken. Sor Juana's insistence on authorship and acknowledgment asserts that libertarian justice demands both the right to produce knowledge and the right to be recognized as its rightful owner.