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'Would You Say You Had Sex If...' Rhetorical Meaning-Making Within Intimate Encounters And Their Discourses At The Macro, Meso, And Micro Levels, Megan Orcholski

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advances a deeper understanding of the rhetoric of intimate encounters by analyzing meaning-making practices at the intersections of sex, sexuality, and sexualized violence at the macro, meso, and micro levels. The object of my analysis is discourse about sex, sexuality, and sexualized violence, but this analysis also has implications on understandings of how corporeal rhetorics, or communicative meaning within bodies, are operating in moments of intimate encounters. Throughout my chapters, I interrogate how normative scripts around sex are constructed, disseminated, and perpetuated, how these normative assumptions impact intimate encounters and their connected public discourses, and how these normative …