Sacred Texts as Sites of Contested Meaning

Sor Juana engaged in sophisticated biblical and theological exegesis, arguing from within Christian tradition against patriarchal restrictions on women's learning. She did not reject sacred authority but reread it, demonstrating that the texts themselves could justify her intellectual pursuits. This method—working within tradition while transforming its meaning—appears across civil disobedience movements. The U.S. Constitution was reinterpreted to support civil rights; Islamic tradition was reread to support women's education; indigenous legal traditions were recovered to oppose colonial impositions. This concept reveals that resistance need not mean rejecting all authority; it can mean radically reinterpreting it. For contemporary movements, this suggests the power of textual politics: challenging unjust laws by appealing to higher principles in the same legal framework, or exposing contradictions between stated values and actual practices. The disobedient act becomes hermeneutical—a refusal to accept one reading as final.