Identity as Layered and Contested

Sor Juana inhabited multiple, sometimes contradictory identities: a woman in a male intellectual tradition, a nun asserting secular knowledge, a person of indigenous and Spanish heritage navigating colonial hierarchies, a member of a privileged household with access others lacked. Rather than resolving these contradictions into a unified self, intersectional practice requires naming them. This concept, rooted in Sor Juana's lived complexity, teaches that identity is not a stable essence but a terrain where power relations, history, and personal agency intersect. In practice, this means resisting the temptation to present yourself or others as coherent and consistent, instead developing literacy in the specific ways your different identities create both privilege and constraint in different contexts.