Intellectual Lineage and Choosing Ancestors

Sor Juana claimed lineage from classical and medieval philosophers, from Christian theologians, from indigenous Mexican knowledge, and from other women thinkers—choosing her ancestors across the boundaries of nation, gender, time, and orthodoxy. This concept emphasizes the intersectional practice of active genealogy: seeking out and centering thinkers, practices, and traditions that speak to your specific position and struggles. For people with multiply-marginalized identities, dominant intellectual history often provides no mirrors; actively choosing intellectual ancestors—even across difference—becomes necessary and generative. This means young Black scholars finding in W.E.B. Du Bois; queer people seeking out James Baldwin; indigenous intellectuals reclaiming pre-colonial epistemologies; working-class thinkers reading Marx and hooks. The practice resists the isolation that marginalization creates by building connections to lineages of thought and resistance. In intersectional practice, this framework validates the creative work of finding and naming your intellectual family, and it recognizes that such genealogies are political acts—reclaiming knowledge, redistributing authority, and modeling for others that there are many ways to think and many ancestors who thought like you.