A critical reading practice that questions the origins, interests, and power dynamics embedded in how cultures name people, categories, and identities.
Sor Juana read texts—religious, philosophical, scientific—with acute attention to whose interests they served and what they obscured. Applying this hermeneutics of suspicion to naming practices reveals that names are never neutral: they encode power, history, and cultural assumptions. A person named in a colonizer's language carries different implications than one bearing an indigenous name; similarly, categories like 'woman,' 'mestiza,' or 'intellectual' carry contested meanings shaped by those with power to define. Sor Juana's critical intelligence shows us how to read naming practices carefully, asking: who named this, for what purpose, and whose reality does it obscure? This approach liberates individuals from passive acceptance of inherited names and categories. Across cultures, applying critical hermeneutics to identity naming becomes a tool for justice: understanding that one's name and identity categories are products of history rather than natural inevitabilities opens space for reclaiming, renaming, and redefining oneself authentically.
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