The Performative Act of Self-Naming

Sor Juana performed her identity through writing—through poems, defenses, intellectual arguments, and public stances—creating herself as a knowing subject through the act of speaking and writing in her own voice. Her tradition reveals identity as performative: it emerges through doing, through linguistic and social acts repeated until they solidify into recognized selfhood. This concept draws on how identity across cultures is constructed through performance—through ritual, speech, dress, practice, and public participation. A person claims identity not through inner feeling alone but through the repeated performance of that identity in social space. This understanding helps explain how marginalized people can claim identities against prevailing stereotypes by performing them persistently: the artist who claims legitimacy through creating, the activist who performs political identity through resistance, the immigrant who performs belonging through participating in new communities. Self-naming thus becomes a practice requiring courage, persistence, and community recognition—it is something people do, not something they simply are.