Visibility and Erasure in Cisgender Memory

Despite her brilliance and productivity, Sor Juana remains less known than her male contemporaries; her works have been subject to revision, suppression, and reinterpretation by subsequent scholars and authorities. This concept examines erasure as a mechanism of cisgender identity maintenance: women's intellectual work disappears from historical record through forgetting, misattribution, or reframing. The concept of visibility and erasure reveals that cisgender identity is not only about individual psychology but about collective memory and historical narrative. What gets remembered as important knowledge? Whose intellectual genealogy is visible in curricula and canons? How does the systematic erasure of women's contributions reinforce cisgender identity by making male intellectual authority appear natural and inevitable? This framework helps explain why contemporary cisgender women report feeling like they're discovering ideas already known but attributed to men, or why women's scholarship is cited less frequently despite equivalent quality. Examining cisgender identity through visibility and erasure moves beyond individual recognition to structural questions: How are knowledge systems structured to make some contributors visible and others invisible? What would cisgender identity look like if women's intellectual contributions were fully remembered?