Intellectual Sovereignty as Resistance

Sor Juana's insistence on her right to study, question, and publish despite colonial and patriarchal constraints embodies intellectual sovereignty—the assertion that colonized peoples possess the authority to generate, interpret, and validate their own knowledge. This concept rejects the colonial episteme that positioned European thought as universal truth while dismissing indigenous and subaltern knowledge systems. In postcolonial contexts, intellectual sovereignty means reclaiming the power to define one's reality, history, and identity through one's own frameworks rather than accepting imposed narratives. Sor Juana's defense of women's education and her theological disputations model how marginalized subjects can use dominant institutions' own tools—literacy, rhetoric, argumentation—to challenge their exclusion. For decolonization, intellectual sovereignty becomes the foundational practice: without the right to think differently, political and cultural liberation remain incomplete.