Gendered Sovereignty and the Intellectual Commons

Sor Juana's exclusion from formal intellectual institutions despite her genius exposes how international law reflects and reinforces gendered power structures. International legal frameworks historically excluded women from treaty negotiation, interpretation authority, and legal personhood, treating women's knowledge and rights as secondary concerns. This concept reveals that international law's claim to represent universal justice masks patriarchal assumptions about who counts as a legitimate knower and rights-bearer. Sor Juana's fight for intellectual space demonstrates that women's exclusion from legal interpretation is not incidental but structural—international law's very architecture depends on marginalizing women's voices. True limitation of international law requires recognizing how gender hierarchies shape legal doctrine and who claims authority to interpret it. By centering women's intellectual traditions and demanding their participation in international legal processes, we expose current frameworks' partiality. The concept of gendered sovereignty insists that nations and communities led by women's epistemic traditions need protection from international law's patriarchal impositions, not integration into them on patriarchal terms.