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

Abstract

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.