Rights as Bodily Entitlement

When Sor Juana claimed the right to study, she was claiming the right to use her body's time, energy, and resources for intellectual work rather than reproductive or service labor. Rights, for her, were not philosophical abstractions but material claims on physical existence. The right to education means the right to have your body present in schools and libraries. The right to speech means the right to move your mouth and hands to communicate without punishment. The right to work means control over how your body's labor is deployed. Applied to body as identity, this reframes rights as bodily entitlements—the freedom to move, rest, eat, dress, and occupy space according to your own determination. A robust physical self-concept includes clarity about bodily rights: the right to refuse touch, to set boundaries, to control access to your body, to choose how you spend physical time and energy. Sor Juana's life demonstrates that these are not luxuries or privileges but conditions for authentic identity. Without bodily autonomy—without the right to determine how your physical self is used—identity cannot be authentically yours. Rights are the material conditions that allow a true body-as-identity to exist.