Rights as Recursive and Expanding Practice

Sor Juana claimed rights—to education, to intellectual life, to voice—that institutions had not formally granted, expanding what rights could mean through the sheer force of her example. In intersectional practice, rights are not handed down from power but reclaimed and expanded through collective action by those denied them. Rights frameworks must be understood as alive, contestable, and recursive: each assertion of a denied right creates precedent for others to claim similar rights and for adjacent rights to become imaginable. This applies across intersectional domains—reproductive rights expand to bodily autonomy; workplace rights expand to protection from harassment; intellectual rights expand to epistemic justice. Practitioners working from this framework avoid waiting for formal permission and instead document, celebrate, and amplify instances where marginalized people are asserting their rights. This creates cultural and legal momentum that transforms what is considered rightfully claimable, making rights itself an intersectional practice of collective liberation.