(Re)reading Sor Juana’s Rhetorics: The Intersectional, Cultural, and Feminist Rhetorician

ABSTRACT

Sor Juana, a criolla nun in Mexico’s colonial period, is most recognized for her letter, “La Respuesta” (or “The Response”), to the Bishop of Puebla where she fiercely championed women’s rights in the Americas. However, few discursive spaces take up critical examinations of her work. As such, she is often inscribed within the remnants of White, European intellectual legacies. But what if there was more? Sor Juana’s epistolary writing is a rich site of revisionary possibilities, especially as feminist archival methodology flourishes in rhetoric and composition. This article aims to complicate discussions of Sor Juana as a (proto)feminist rhetorician by including interdisciplinary and intersectional renderings of her embodied, epistolary writing. Drawing on Black feminist rhetorics, I argue that we can discursively (re)read Sor Juana not just as a rhetorician but as an intersectional, cultural, and feminist rhetorician.

Notes

1. I am deeply grateful for the time and many thoughtful comments from RR reviewers, Aja Martinez and Elizabethada Wright. Your guidance and dialogue with the ideas here have made this essay possible.

2. See The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to Present.

3. Also see Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Dairy of a Law Professor.

4. Jones describes the difference as “‘black,’ with a lower-case ‘b’ to speak of people and color: as in black Africans or black slaves. ‘Black’ with an upper case ‘B,’ instead, refers to concepts, ideology, and culture. In a more taxonomical sense, I [Jones] also use ‘black’ as an umbrella term that includes and refers to the racial hierarchies and identities of people” (“Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic” 268). Also see Ilans Stavans (xii-xv).

5. Jones describes “Habla de negros as it emerges in Sor Juana’s villancicos is a linguistic embodiment of Blackness not only in seventeenth-century Mexico, but also in the African diaspora at large” (270).

6. See Jones’s Staging Habla de Negros.

7. I must note that I do not use these casta terms lightly as they are outdated and offensive.

8. Her father’s Basque heritage could have also played a part in Sor Juana’s distinctive, resistive rhetoric as Spain enforced oppressive rule over the Basque region.

9. See page 77 for full context.

10. See Patricia Hills Collins.

11. See Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga’s concept of “theory in the flesh.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexis McGee

Alexis McGee received her Ph.D. with two certificates of concentration: one in linguistics and the other in rhetoric and composition from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media. Alexis is also a current member of NCTE’s “Cultivating New Voices” cohort and the past recipient of NCTE’s “Early Educator of Color Leadership Award.”

Her research lies at the intersections of Black feminist theory, Black rhetoric, language, and literacies; sound; and pedagogy. Pulling these threads together, her first manuscript, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetoric, largely argues that music has served/still serves as a pathway for Black women to teach subsequent generations about resistance, survival, and liberation. This work is currently under advance contract with SUNY Press.

Along with her book project, Alexis is also working on extra-institutional mentorship projects; and theorizing Black voice. You can also see more of her work in Pedagogy and Obsidian as well as the e-book Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media; The Lauryn Hill Reader; and The Lemonade Reader