Collective Liberation: Animals and Human Justice Movements

Sor Juana's intellectual work contributed to women's eventual liberation, yet she lived in an epoch when her gender oppression was distinct from slavery, indigenous exploitation, and other structured injustices. Contemporary animal ethics inherits her challenge to systemic thinking: recognizing that the logic exploiting animals parallels logic exploiting colonized peoples, enslaved persons, and women, while respecting specific histories of oppression. This concept proposes collective liberation frameworks understanding animal liberation as inseparable from human justice struggles. The same industries extracting labor from animals exploit vulnerable human workers; the same epistemic violence dismissing animal minds dismisses indigenous knowledge systems; the same property logic treating animals as resources treated colonized peoples. Sor Juana's convent ultimately could not protect her individually; protection requires movement building, coalition work, and transformation of the systems enabling oppression across categories. Animal liberation becomes part of broader justice vision.