Transgressive Reading and Cultural Reinterpretation

Sor Juana was a close reader of religious and classical texts, finding within them spaces for women's intellectual authority and complexity. She read "against the grain" of official interpretation, locating resources within tradition for her own project. This transgressive reading practice shows how texts and traditions need not be rejected wholesale but can be queried, reinterpreted, and mined for alternative meanings. For Pacific communities, this concept validates engaging with both indigenous and Christian traditions—which may carry complicated histories of gender—in ways that seek out liberatory threads. This might mean reading Pacific origin stories to highlight non-binary beings or female leadership; engaging Christian theology to emphasize justice and dignity rather than sexual normativity; or finding in customary practice frameworks that accommodate gender diversity beneath colonial translations. Transgressive reading is not false consciousness but honest engagement: the refusal to abandon traditions entirely while refusing their oppressive uses. It honors that culture contains resources for its own transformation.