Strategic Self-Fashioning Across Boundaries

Sor Juana navigated the intersections of gender, race, class, and religious authority by adopting strategic personas—the dutiful nun, the flattering poet, the humble scholar—while pursuing her own agenda. Strategic self-fashioning is not inauthenticity but tactical code-switching done with intention and consciousness. In intersectional practice, this recognizes that people holding multiple marginalized identities often must perform differently in different spaces to survive and advance their goals. This framework validates these performances as intelligent adaptation rather than condemning them as false. However, it also acknowledges the psychological cost of constant navigation. Understanding strategic self-fashioning helps practitioners recognize agency in actions that might appear complicit, while still naming the injustice that makes such strategies necessary in the first place.