The Rhetoric of Humility as Power

Sor Juana prefaced her boldest theological arguments with protestations of humility and deference to male authority. This rhetorical strategy—deploying gender expectations as protective armor while advancing radical ideas—reveals how privilege acknowledgment can be strategic. By claiming inadequacy, she made her arguments less threatening to those who held institutional power. Yet this same move paradoxically strengthened her work: it demonstrated the absurdity of women's exclusion from intellectual life while seeming to accept it. This concept examines how those with less privilege often must acknowledge and perform deference to be heard at all. It raises uncomfortable questions: Does strategic humility reinforce the systems it temporarily navigates? Or does it represent wisdom about survival within oppression? The Sorjuanine approach suggests both can be true. Acknowledging privilege includes recognizing that those without it must often deploy rhetorical strategies of deference that reinforce hierarchies they are simultaneously disrupting. True privilege acknowledgment means not demanding that the marginalized abandon these survival tactics.