Language as Site of Justice and Control

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish, the colonizer's language imposed on New Spain, yet made it serve her own intellectual and artistic purposes. She navigated theological Latin, courtly rhetoric, and popular forms—each with different rules about who could speak authoritatively. Control over language means control over reality: naming injustice requires language permission; claiming identity requires linguistic legitimacy. Patriarchal societies controlled women's language (modest, obedient speech); colonial societies imposed colonizer languages while suppressing indigenous ones; class societies delegitimized working-class dialects as uneducated. Fairness requires language democratization: expanding who gets to define terms, whose words count as knowledge, which dialects and languages receive respect. Sor Juana's poetry claimed intellectual authority in forms supposedly meant for entertainment; her letters used humble rhetoric to contain radical ideas. She worked within language constraints while stretching them toward her purposes. Periagoge explores how movements for fairness always involve linguistic struggle—reclaiming slurs, inventing new vocabulary for oppression, insisting that marginalized people's speech deserves serious attention and interpretation.