| Abstract | Professional memoirs provide a window into cultural understandings of the workplace and workers at a particular sociocultural moment. When professional memoirs are written by those who do not fit standard cultural perceptions of a professional in that field, memoirists use rhetorical strategies to develop their ethos and define themselves as experts to their readers. By rhetorically analyzing contemporary women’s professional memoirs—written by public figures and consumed widely by a reading public—through feminist theories of ethos, this study examines how high-profile working women rhetorically construct their professional selves and expertise within the political, economic, and social culture of America in the 2010s. In three public, rhetorical, and white-male-dominated professional fields—American politics, comedy, and Protestant Christianity—women use best selling memoirs to counter public narratives and professional norms that deem them unable to embody the standard professional of the field. Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Warren, Condoleezza Rice, and Kamala Harris expand political professionalism to fit their bodies and experiences by incorporating ecological and communal elements into their professional ethos through depictions in their memoirs of the challenges with authenticity, ambition, bodies, and relationships faced by women in politics. In funny memoirs about the precarious profession of comedy, Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Tiffany Haddish, and Ali Wong articulate how they navigate professional beauty norms, environments, and relationships, ultimately crafting woman-centered interpretations of the comedy field and decentralizing the figure of the white male professional comedian. Austin Channing Brown, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Katie Davis foreground atypical professional characteristics of woman professionals in the field of American Protestant Christianity in their memoirs, and reading communities take up these qualities in their reviews on the social media site Goodreads. These reviews illustrate how memoirs can adapt reader understandings of what constitutes a religious professional. Overall, these best selling memoirists rhetorically present themselves in ways that both satisfy and defy the cultural conception of a professional in their fields, addressing (implicitly or explicitly) the social, political, and cultural professional norms of the 2010s in regard to gender, race, class, and other markers of intersectional positionality. |
