The Conversion Performance and Concealment

Sor Juana's public retraction of her intellectual claims—arguably coerced by ecclesiastical authority—while privately maintaining intellectual correspondence reveals the complex psychology of disobedience under surveillance. Her apparent capitulation masked continued engagement with forbidden ideas, demonstrating that visible compliance and hidden resistance often coexist. This concept enriches civil disobedience theory by acknowledging that not all resistance is transparent; many communities under oppression survive through code-switching and strategic concealment. Sor Juana's tradition teaches discernment about when to openly defy and when to preserve resistance capacity through seeming conformity. For civil disobedience across cultures, this framework validates diverse resistance modes: some disobedients publicly refuse, others work invisibly, and many do both sequentially or simultaneously. Understanding conversion-performance prevents romanticizing only visible martyrdom while validating survival-through-strategy as legitimate dissent.