Justice Through Intellectual Recognition

Sor Juana understood that her fight for the right to think, write, and be taken seriously was fundamentally a justice issue. Denying women, indigenous peoples, and colonized subjects the recognition of their intellectual capacity was not a minor slight but a foundational injustice. Contemporary justice movements increasingly recognize that identity justice requires epistemic justice—the right to be heard, believed, and recognized as a knower. When dominant histories erase the names of women thinkers, colonized intellectuals, or non-Western philosophers, they commit injustice at the level of identity itself. Someone whose intellectual contributions are attributed to someone else, or whose name is never recorded at all, suffers identity erasure alongside material loss. This concept argues that rectifying historical wrongs requires restoring names to their proper places—crediting indigenous knowledge keepers, recovering women's authorship, centering non-Western thinkers. Justice in the realm of identity and names means creating systems of recognition where all people's intellectual dignity is acknowledged.