Epistemic Disobedience Through Poetry

Sor Juana's strategic deployment of poetry, satire, and courtly wit allowed her to articulate philosophical and theological positions that direct argumentation would have rendered heretical or seditious. Poetry functioned as epistemic disobedience—a refusal to accept rigid disciplinary boundaries and a claim that imaginative, affective, and embodied knowledge possess validity equal to scholastic abstraction. This practice is crucial for postcolonial and decolonial projects: dominant institutions police not only what can be said but how it can be said. By insisting that indigenous narratives, oral histories, spiritual traditions, and artistic expressions constitute legitimate knowledge rather than mere folklore or entertainment, postcolonial societies challenge the colonizer's monopoly on truth. Sor Juana's model suggests that decolonization requires reclaiming expressive autonomy—the right to articulate reality through one's own aesthetic and intellectual forms, not only through imposed academic or bureaucratic languages that embed colonial assumptions.