Reclaiming the Body as Site of Knowledge

Sor Juana lived in a tradition that often opposed body and mind, sensuality and spirituality. Her religious commitment required renouncing bodily pleasure and prioritizing intellectual work as higher than physical existence. Yet her poetry reveals profound engagement with sensory experience—color, texture, desire, physical presence. This tension between body-denial and embodied experience is crucial for examining cisgender identity, which is fundamentally embodied. Cisgender means alignment between social gender category and the body one inhabits, yet this alignment is rarely uncomplicated. Bodies change, age, sicken, desire, bleed, break. Many people learn to ignore bodily knowledge in favor of intellectual or social frameworks. Sor Juana's poetry suggests an alternative: treating bodily experience as legitimate knowledge. What does your body tell you about your gender identity? What sensations, capacities, and experiences have you learned to dismiss as irrelevant to 'real' identity? Reclaiming the body as knowledge source means honoring embodied experience—pleasure, pain, desire, disability, change—as equally valid to rational analysis. This is not regressing to biological determinism but rather integrating the wisdom your body carries about who you authentically are.