Intersectional Justice Beyond Legal Categories

Sor Juana's situation—oppressed as a woman, a colonial subject, a religious questioner, an intellectual—could not be addressed by international law focused on any single axis of identity or justice. This concept reveals that international law's categorical approach to rights and justice systematically fails people whose oppression operates through multiple simultaneous systems. International law addresses gender discrimination, colonialism, religious persecution, or intellectual freedom separately, as if they function independently; Sor Juana's life demonstrates their entanglement. Women facing colonialism experience gendered forms of colonization that neither women's rights law nor anticolonial law adequately addresses. International law's failure to think intersectionally means it cannot deliver justice to multiply-marginalized people. This concept calls for reimagining justice beyond law's categorical logic toward approaches that recognize simultaneous, mutually-reinforcing oppressions. Sor Juana's intellectual traditions offer resources for this work—synthesizing multiple knowledge systems, refusing single-identity reduction, maintaining complexity. International law's limits become clear when we see how its categorical frameworks systematically exclude those whose oppression exceeds any single category, suggesting that true justice requires justice frameworks fundamentally different from international law's structure.