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“What If I Am a Woman?”: Black Feminist Rhetorical Strategies of Intersectional Identification and Resistance in Maria Stewart’s Texts

ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that an analysis of Maria W. Stewart’s rhetorical choices extends her legacy as an early proponent of the intersectionality of African American female identity. She uses casuistry as defined by Kenneth Burke, dissociation as articulated by Chaim Perelman and applied by Shirley Wilson Logan, and rearticulation as defined by Patricia Hill Collins to confirm herself as sacrificially American through consubstantiation, nobly African by history, and divinely feminine by God. She articulates a Black female consciousness that is empowered to move toward breaking the oppressive conditions of their triple consciousness. Her use of rearticulation to resolve the failures of respectability politics provides relevance for the use of African American feminist theories as a rhetorical technique.