Epistemic Justice and Testimony

Sor Juana had to defend her right to think, write, and speak with authority about theology, science, and philosophy—realms where her gender, colonial status, and religious position all rendered her testimony suspect. This speaks directly to epistemic injustice: the systematic credibility deficits assigned to people based on identity. In intersectional practice, epistemic justice means recognizing how testimonial credibility is unequally distributed—whose knowledge counts, whose lived experience is trusted, whose interpretation is credited. A poor woman's knowledge of poverty is discredited by economists; a trans person's understanding of gender is questioned by cisgender academics; a person with disability's expertise about their own needs is overridden by medical authority. Sor Juana's responses—her meticulous argumentation, her appeals to religious authority, her demonstrations of superior knowledge—reveal the extra burdens placed on marginalized knowers. This concept helps practitioners build epistemic communities that privilege credibility in non-dominant sources, challenge testimonial injustice, and create spaces where multiple ways of knowing are recognized as valid.