Strategic Self-Naming and Authorship

Sor Juana signed her works and claimed her voice in an era when women were expected to remain silent. Strategic self-naming means actively choosing how you present yourself to the world, particularly across cultural contexts where your name carries different meanings or assumptions. This practice involves authoring your own narrative rather than accepting names and identities assigned by family, institutions, or colonial power structures. In multicultural contexts, strategic self-naming allows individuals to navigate between multiple identity expectations: you might be known by different names in different communities, each representing a conscious choice about which aspects of identity to emphasize. Sor Juana's use of the pen name and her careful construction of her public intellectual persona demonstrates how self-naming becomes an act of resistance and self-determination. This framework empowers people to claim agency over their identities, especially those who inherit names from multiple cultural traditions or who must translate their identity across linguistic and cultural boundaries.