In, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Karlyn Campbell states, “Rhetors/authors, because they are linked to cultures and collectivities, must negotiate among institutional powers…are best described as “points of articulation” rather than originators” (5).
This statement helps resolve an issue I have been wrestling with over the last few weeks. As I first started examining spiritual experiences as rhetorical, I had trouble with deciding who, exactly the author and the audience are. Is it God or a deity? The person who had the experience? Both? However, through several readings on rhetorical agency, I’ve come to understand that answering that question isn’t necessary. Rather, it is a case of reframing of the situation by adding and understanding of rhetorical agency.
Campbell defines rhetorical agency as, “The capacity to act, that is, to have competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized and heeded by others in one’s community” (3). Consider the earlier quotation from Campbell, and change “author” to “agent,” as in “one who has agency.” That is, people have agency because they are linked to cultures and collectivities (who grant the agency), but they must negotiate between these institutional powers. Thinking of agents as “points of articulation” works particularly well in the case of spiritual experiences. As “authorship” is hard to identify, it is much more helpful to think of the person having the experience as the “point of articulation,” the person who talks or writes about the experience to communicate what happened to others.
I am using Brenda Brasher’s (“My Beloved is All-Radiant: Two Case Studies of Congregational-Based Christian Fundamentalist Female Enclaves and the Experiences They Cultivate Among Women”) definition of “spiritual (or religious) experience.” She defines this as a narrative of a divine/self encounter – that is, a woman believes she has a direct experience with the divine in some way, and then shares it with her community (Brasher 235-236).
The prescribed agency for women in patriarchal fundamentalist communities appears very limited – women are usually barred from leading worship, being pastors, teaching mixed-gender groups, and sometimes barred from speaking in church at all. Teachings on family emphasize the subservience of women to their husbands. However, as these women negotiate the institutional powers of their cultures and collectivities, they negotiate agency even within the formal church structure, mainly by creating women’s organizations within the church itself.
The agency at work in the women’s enclaves Brasher studied demonstrates one of the paradoxes of rhetorical agency particularly well. Campbell writes, “Agency is constitutive of collectivities, whether temporary or persistent, fragile or powerful, just as collectivities are constitutive of agency.” Agency enables collectivities, and collectivities enable agency in their members. Brasher notes that women reported the more religious/spiritual experiences in the places where women were least marginalized – the home and in women’s enclaves (236). That is, they experienced the most spiritual encounters in the places where they had the most agency. Women then share these experiences with others in their Bible studies and women’s groups. These groups of women then affirm (or deny) the legitimacy of the spiritual experience, thereby reinforcing or creating agency of the women. According to Brasher, “Women willingly invest time in assessing each other’s religious experiences…by doing so, they provide a method by which they can validate or deny each other’s religious voices and decrease their reliance on a male pastor’s religious insight. Agency is created by this group and used almost exclusively within the group.
Brasher notes that what went on in the women’s groups with respect to religious/spiritual experiences lead the women to individually pursue these experiences beyond the events and boundaries of their own groups (238). It seems that the agency affirmed in the group leads to individual agency as well.
Brasher, Brenda E. “My Beloved is All Radiant: Two Case Studies of Congregational-Based Christian Fundamentalist Female Enclaves and the Religious Experiences They Cultivate Among Women.” Review of Religious Research 38.3 (1997): 231-246. Print.
Campbell, Karlyn K. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communications and Critical/Cultural Studies 2.1 (2005): 1-19. Print.
