Naming as Reclamation

Sor Juana carefully controlled how she was named and identified throughout her life, signing her works, choosing her religious name, and defining her intellectual contributions. In many cultural contexts, naming has been a tool of power: colonizers renamed peoples and places, enslavers renamed the enslaved, dominant groups renamed minority traditions as primitive or inferior. Reclaiming the right to name—to call oneself by chosen names, to describe one's own experience in one's own terms, to preserve and validate traditional names and categories—becomes an essential practice of decolonization and identity assertion. This includes naming experiences that were previously unnamed (like certain forms of discrimination or beauty), naming lineages that were erased, and naming oneself in ways that reflect actual rather than imposed identity. Across cultures, naming reclamation appears in language revitalization movements, the choice to use traditional rather than colonial surnames, and the insistence on accurate self-description. Naming is not merely semantic; it is ontological—it affirms the right to exist and be known on one's own terms.