The Right to Intellectual Authorship

Sor Juana's life exemplified the struggle for intellectual recognition across gendered and colonial boundaries. She asserted her right to pursue knowledge and claim authorship of her work despite institutional pressure to silence her voice. This concept examines how names and identities are tied to intellectual property and recognition across cultures. When colonized peoples, women, and marginalized groups are denied authorship of their own knowledge systems, their identities are colonized alongside their territories. Reclaiming the right to intellectual authorship becomes an act of cultural identity assertion. In contemporary contexts, this means recognizing indigenous knowledge systems, women philosophers, and non-Western thinkers as legitimate knowledge producers whose names deserve equal standing in global discourse.