Sor Juana deployed theology and religious authority to critique her exclusion from education, showing how marginalized classes can use dominant discourse systems to expose their own oppression.
Rather than rejecting the theological and ecclesiastical frameworks that constrained her, Sor Juana mastered them and turned them inward to critique the injustice of restricting women's intellectual development. She quoted scripture, invoked church fathers, and engaged theological arguments to defend her right to study—using the oppressor's language against oppression itself. For class consciousness, this demonstrates a sophisticated strategy: marginalized groups develop deeper fluency in dominant systems' own logic and values to expose their contradictions. Sor Juana's Response to Sor Philothea doesn't reject religious authority but shows how women's education aligns with Christian virtue and intellectual flourishing. This approach reveals that class consciousness doesn't require abandoning all dominant frameworks but rather achieving mastery sufficient to demonstrate their internal contradictions. When people from lower classes become exceptionally educated in elite systems, they occupy a unique position to critique those systems' hypocrisy and exclusionary practices from within their own language.
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