Epistemic Justice and Women's Knowledge

Sor Juana's era devalued women's thinking as derivative, emotional, or spiritually inferior to male rationality. Her rigorous philosophical and scientific work demanded recognition as genuine knowledge production. Epistemic justice—the idea that all people deserve to be heard as knowers—directly challenges how femininity is constructed to diminish women's credibility. When society frames femininity as emotional, intuitive, or bodily rather than rational and intellectual, it denies women epistemic standing. For contested femininity, this concept insists that thinking, theorizing, and expertise are not masculine properties but human capacities. Recognizing women's knowledge as valid challenges the gendered hierarchy of thought itself, dismantling a core mechanism by which femininity is constructed as inferior.