Resistance to Symbolic Appropriation

After Sor Juana's death, her work was appropriated, reframed, and claimed by institutions seeking to control her meaning. She was made a saint, her feminism minimized, her radical ideas softened. This concept recognizes that identity itself—how one is represented, remembered, and interpreted—constitutes a form of property and freedom. When powerful actors appropriate someone's image, story, or legacy without consent or against their actual positions, they commit a form of theft and violation. In modern terms, this includes cultural appropriation, biographical distortion, being made a symbol against one's will, and having one's work reinterpreted to serve causes one opposed. Libertarian justice requires defending people's right to self-representation and to object when their words or image are misused. This extends property rights into the realm of identity: you own your name, your story, and your legacy. The practice Sor Juana's example suggests is documentation, publication in your own voice, explicit statements of your values—creating a record that resists appropriation. For marginalized people especially, this becomes crucial to preventing co-optation and maintaining authentic representation of one's own thought.