Women and rhetoric: Composing text, self, and professional authority.

Professional women, in our training and our work, often encounter discourse fashioned by men. Can we use that language for our purposes, and, if so, how? I pose these questions by listening to eight protestant clergywomen describe how they compose sermons, a process which includes establishing their professional authority to speak. My method is phenomenological; my interpretations are based on my personal experience as a clergywomen. Western religious discourse is markedly gendered as masculine, and men have filled the pulpits for millennia; women have only recently entered this space in appreciable numbers. Our homiletic training, the church's language, and our working environments can create an atmosphere which receives our words negatively, varying from indifference and/or perplexity to hostility. In such circumstances, one feels exposed, shamed, and speechless, particularly because religious apperceptions are intimate and difficult to verbalize. How do these women find voice? First, they author their lives, to use mikhail bakhtin's metaphor, to overcome shame and claim their professional authority by recasting the rhetorical genre of sermon into the form of a conversation. They bring their experiences into conversation with those of congregational members and colleagues by composing collaboratively, in addition to using the traditional authority of scripture and commentaries. Second, they express a strong commitment to their vocation in terms of divine call. This belief carries them beyond their culture's gender role constraints and gives them warrant to pursue their profession. I mirror the french feminist debate about ecriture feminine by enacting the theme of composing as conversation through the use of parallel narratives, an upper text which relates the womens', and my, stories and a lower text in the form of italicized footnotes which provide interpretive space for many voices to sound. I reject capitalization to undermine certain implications of naming, such as the existing of the self as a unitary entity which speaks with a single voice. This device implements julia kristeva's definition of self as a site where meanings converge and split and intensifies the metaphor of life as an act of composition.Ph.D.EducationLanguage artsReligious educationSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128708/2/9124084.pd