The Burden of Invisible Labor

Sor Juana critiqued how women's intellectual and domestic labor remained invisible, uncompensated, and taken for granted. Environmental injustice similarly concentrates on those performing invisible environmental labor: women fetching contaminated water, caregivers managing pollution-related illnesses, Indigenous peoples stewarding lands without recognition or benefit. Communities bearing environmental burdens absorb the cost of others' extraction and consumption through degraded health, exhausting care work, and depleted resources. This framework makes visible the gendered and racialized dimensions of environmental burden-bearing. When a neighborhood becomes a dumping ground, residents—particularly women and elders—perform vast uncompensated labor managing environmental illness, grief, and adaptation. Sor Juana's life exemplifies refusal to accept invisibility; environmental justice demands visibility and valuation of this labor through reparations, policy changes, and transformed resource distribution.