Intersectional Climate Responsibility

Sor Juana inhabited multiple marginalized identities: woman, illegitimate, mixed-race in colonial Mexico, and intellectual. Her work demonstrates how different forms of injustice interlock. Applied to climate justice, intersectional responsibility means recognizing that climate change does not affect all people equally—women in the Global South face compounded vulnerabilities from patriarchy, poverty, and environmental degradation simultaneously. This framework refuses to separate climate action from decolonization, labor rights, gender equity, and economic justice. Climate solutions that ignore these connections risk perpetuating the very oppressive systems that created the crisis. Sor Juana's intellectual legacy demands that climate movements center the experiences of those facing multiple overlapping harms: Indigenous women, workers in fossil fuel industries, migrants displaced by environmental catastrophe. Intersectional climate responsibility means that environmental restoration cannot succeed without addressing colonial land theft, economic exploitation, and patriarchal violence. Climate justice becomes impossible when approached through a single-issue lens.