Gender, Care Work, and Climate Responsibility

Sor Juana's life illuminates how women's intellectual and social contributions are systematically devalued. Contemporary climate context reveals this through gendered patterns: women comprise majority of agricultural workers, water collectors, and caregivers for climate-displaced communities, yet are excluded from climate policy decisions. Women's knowledge of plants, seeds, and local ecosystems, accumulated through subsistence work, rarely counts as expertise in international climate negotiations. This concept demands recognition of care work—childcare, elder care, food production, water management—as fundamentally environmental and climate work. Climate justice means compensating this labor, elevating women's leadership in solutions, and transforming patriarchal structures that treat both women and nature as resources to exploit. Sor Juana's insistence on intellectual recognition parallels demands that women's climate knowledge be treated as expertise. Furthermore, sustainable futures require valuing care, cooperation, and interdependence over competitive extraction—qualities society has feminized while denying them legitimacy. True climate responsibility means centering what women already know about living sustainably.