The Genealogy of Injustice

Sor Juana's critique of women's exclusion from education began by exposing the faulty logic and historical contingency on which it rested. She refused the claim that women's intellectual incapacity was natural; instead she showed how tradition, fear, and bad reasoning had been mistaken for universal law. In Confucian role identity, individuals often inherit restrictions they assume are essential to their role. The genealogy of injustice is a practice of historical and logical investigation: tracing your constraints back to their actual origins, asking who benefited from their establishment, and examining whether the original reasons still hold. This practice does not require you to abandon your role but to become conscious of which aspects reflect true wisdom and which reflect only power. Sor Juana's example shows that such inquiry, pursued with rigor and respect, can transform how one inhabits one's position—not by leaving it, but by understanding its true character.