Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article analyzes representations of American Catholic sisters in discourse surrounding the Vatican’s recent and controversial Apostolic Visitation, with an eye to how identity norms for women can be masked in rhetorical choices and unveiled through rhetorical analysis. The Visitation was driven partly by fears of feminism’s influence on American Catholic sisters, and it prompted passionate responses from women rhetors regarding the role of faithful sisters in America today. These responses are undergirded by contrasting identity norms for women: whereas Visitation supporters’ discourse relies on and reinforces an Aristotelian norm of obedience, Visitation critics’ discourse relies on and establishes an alternative norm of personal conscience. Combining insights from constitutive rhetoric and sociolinguistics, this study offers a framework for systematically analyzing how language constitutes standards for legitimately enacting identity, with a particular focus on women. Rhetoricians analyzing the rhetorical subtleties of linguistic representation can apply this framework in diverse contexts to more holistically put ethical commitments into rhetorical practice.
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