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This article asserts the viability of key topoi in feminist historiography: first, to establish presence for everyday women rhetors, and second, to explore ramifications of their positioning within variant historical narratives. Catalina Hernández was one of six European women recruited to Christianize indigenous girls immediately following the military conquest of Mexico. Her letter to the civic judicial council seeking autonomy for her community of women teachers was perceived as sufficiently dangerous to warrant its deletion from the historical record and the subsequent "disappearance" of the writer herself; only excerpted accounts of Catalina's writing remain. I seek the historical Catalina Hernández in the sophistic mode, assaying four motives and four contexts for the production and reception of her letter.
Catalina Hernández se esfuma desde entonces: ninguna huella suya ha sido descubierta hasta el presente.
Catalina Hernández then goes up in smoke: no footprint has yet been found.
-Lino Gómez Canedo
In her landmark 2000 essay marking the growth and influence of feminist scholarship in rhetoric history, Patricia Bizzell attributes methodological innovation to the overt and covert operations of emotion in feminist communities ("Feminist Methods"). Here and in collaboration with six authors published in the 2002 Winter issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Bizzell in effect argues for "emotion" or "emotion in community" as a potentially viable topos in feminist historiography. What we have in hand in this recent scholarship is an unusually good view of what "viability" might mean. Bizzell begins by featuring the cohesive function of emotion, billing it as the overlooked common ground in the Xin Liu Gale, Susan Jarratt, and Cheryl Glenn College English controversy; this placement goes some distance in attenuating polarization and shoring up our sensus communis. Yet ensuing discussion implies that emotion's signature quality may just be its unpredictability-its potential to both stabilize and destabilize community. Indeed in the Preface to the Winter 2002 RSQ, Bizzell links "internal controversies" and "opposing arguments" to health and growth (7), then goes so far as to single out Christine Sutherland's argument favoring inclusive community as potentially divisive. It would seem, then, that in its capacity to define and destabilize feminist community, emotion serves as a productive-or viable-common place.
Indeed, in their exploration of the intersections of hermeneutics and rhetoric, Walter Jost and Michael...