Antinarcissistic Rhetoric: Reinforcing Social Inequities through Gender Performance

Abstract

Antinarcissistic rhetoric refers to the ways in which women rhetors appropriate patriarchal discourses in order to create an ethos with their audience. This rhetoric often reinforces the social inequities that require women's silence in the first place. A look to the rhetoric of two historical women, Hortensia and Queen Elizabeth I, theorizes antinarcissistic rhetoric in three parts: the dual gender performance, the use of psogos, and the dismissal of the corporeal body.

Notes

1. Thank you to Rhetoric Review peer reviewers Julie Jung and Catherine Hobbs for their help and direction.

2. While there are certainly more than two genders, this article will rely on the masculine feminine gender dichotomy, as this divide was arguably responsible for antinarcissistic rhetoric.

3. These corporeal signs, addressed in Carol Mattingly's Appropriate[ing] Dress, will be further discussed in a subsequent section; it is important to note here that dress and gestures are both gendered and rhetorical. Consequently, the acts of performing her gender and dismissing her body are both rhetorical acts of gender performance that work simultaneously.

4. Dean of St. Paul.