Rhetoric Commons^™

Incarcerated Women: Gendered Rhetoric From The Outside And Reality Inside Prison Walls., Taylor Riley Geiser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how formerly incarcerated women navigate and resist gendered media portrayals through digital platforms, focusing on the “mad” and “bad” woman tropes that shape public perceptions. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theory—particularly Royster and Kirsch’s methodological practices and Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening—this study combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of mainstream headlines with Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) of TikTok content. CDA of media coverage surrounding Lori Vallow Daybell, Casey Anthony, and Andrea Yates reveals how language, imagery, and cultural logics sustain harmful binaries that portray women who commit crimes either as depraved or as excused by madness, obscuring the …

On A First Name Bias: A Bibliometric Study Of Six Writing Studies Journals, Joe Torok

Wayne State University Dissertations

On a First Name Bias: A Bibliometric Study of Six Writing Studies Journals analyzes citation, authorship, source use, and other bibliometric patterns across a small collection of peer-reviewed journals featuring research from the academic field of writing studies (also known as rhetoric and composition). The study is grounded in a small but established tradition of RAD (replicable, aggregable, data-supported) scholarship in the field and uses bibliometric methods inspired by similar, primarily historiographic research studies within the field of writing studies and by critical inquiry from scholars across disciplines who have used bibliometric analysis to interrogate troubling patterns of publishing and …

#Hotgirlsemestersyllabus, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg, Niya Pickett Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, And The Discursive Production And Policing Of Gender, Alan J. Bandyk, Alan J. Bandyk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis utilizes the works of Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said in a discourse analysis of influencers and writers in the right wing "manosphere." The figures analyzed herein are Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh. Their rhetoric aims to create a discursive woman who embodies traditional notions of gender and sex that de Beauvoir critiqued in 1949. The constant adherence and reference to a mythical past exhibits ways of thinking that coincide perfectly with Jameson's own theoretical work with the term and its inherent false nostalgia. Tate's and Walsh's efforts also fall into discursive attempts at …

Intercultural Communication, Anthony Naaeke

Open Educational Resources

I believe that learning is a life-long process, cumulative, reflective/critical, experiential, accessible to some people and not to others, and directed toward some action that benefits self, community, and the world. From this perspective, we will adopt the open pedagogy method of learning because it is most suitable and beneficial for the following reasons:

1. In open pedagogy the learning doesn’t end after the semester but what we learn in class should motivate all of us to continue to reflect on our lives and the circumstances of our times and neighborhoods and seek ways to address them.

2. Learning builds on learning. …

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Gendered Rhetoric Of Video Game Streaming : Female Agency, Harassment And Cat Girls, Tommie Ann Sutton

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The streaming community is large and varied, with the most popular streamers playing video games daily for audiences of tens of thousands of people. The community is well known for its exclusion and harassment of female players and streamers, despite demographic information showing that most player populations represent an even spread amongst men and women. This study analyzes two case studies in female streamer agency: the first is an IRL streamer named Pokimane and the second on the female animated streamers called VTubers. Specifically, it shows how Pokimane disrupts gendered harassment and how VTubers ignore harassment and perpetuate stereotypes that …

Identity Negotiation, Saudi Women, And The Impact Of The 2011 Royal Decree: An Investigation Of The Cultural, Religious, And Societal Shifts Among Women In The Saudi Arabian Public Sphere, Maha Alshoaibi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, Saudi Arabian culture has been deeply rooted in tradition, religious customs, family-oriented structures, and gender derived expectations for men and women alike. Saudi Arabian culture emphasizes a patriarchal family structure where men financially provide for their family whereas women are expected to manage internal household duties such as raising children, upholding household affairs, and working within a limited scope of employment. The concept of Saudi Arabian women integrating into the public workforce has been a source of contention and debate for the last several hundred years. Due to recent changes in political and economic events, a royal decree issued …

Rendering Reliance: Consuming Coloniality In The Global North, Victoria L. Brown

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I offer a theoretical lens for understanding how the Global South is imagined by the Global North. The Global South has become a popular cause that for-profit companies use in order to engage in what Samantha King terms cause-marketing. While individuals in the South are certainly helped by these campaigns, they are harmed through Northern consumers being empowered by private companies encouraging them to adopt a colonizing gaze that subjugates those in the South with adhering to stereotypes. I develop three rhetorical devices that fulfill stereotypes long-held about those who are “other.”

First, I offer the endangered …

From Feminist Activist To Abortion Barbie: A Rhetorical History Of Abortion Discourse From 2013-2016, Skye De Saint Felix

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a rhetorical history of abortion discourse with an emphasis on the rhetorical moment from 2013-2016. To uncover the rhetorical strategies used to shape consensus on abortion, I highlight three major events—Senator Wendy Davis’s (D-Fort Worth) notorious 13-hour filibuster against Texas’s HB2, the conservative capture of Davis as Abortion Barbie, and the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). Because of these key rhetorical moments, pro-choice and anti-choice publics cultivated a period of heightened tension that reinvigorated abortion debates. While pro-choice groups employed narrative to centralize women as rhetorical agents and open spaces to discuss abortion, …

Beer, Blogs, And Bitches, Lauren Murray

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Beer has been branded as a product that is available to men; we see this in popular advertisements online and on television. The heteronormatively-masculine image that is created presents a complicated rhetorical situation for women interested in beer. When searching the online community for female beer bloggers, I came across blogs that seemed to be addressing women who are alienated in the beer community with hyper-feminine rhetoric. This stark contrast to the rhetoric that we typically see in beer advertisements did not appeal to me either. I've been referred to as "the girlfriend with great taste in beer" and intercepted …

Siren Song: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender And Intimate Partner Violence In Gotham City Sirens, Katlin Schmidt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project investigates comic book discourse. Specifically, I investigate how comic narratives provide readers with an interpretation for how they should discern and assess “appropriate” behaviors for women. The artifact of analysis included in this project is DC Comics Gotham City Sirens (2009). This text features popular female superheroes, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy. Because comic books utilize both textual and visual means to disseminate a message, this project evaluates the visual rhetoric of these characters within the narrative. Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm is used to provide an understanding to how these visual means contribute to the meanings assigned …

Queer The Tech: Genderfucking And Anti-Consumer Activism In Social Media, Matthew A. Vetter

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

A companion text to a piece of online activist rhetoric, this essay attempts to explain how social media networks and other digital interfaces intercede and influence users' constructions of gender and consumer identity. Gaining awareness of the influence networks have over our lives, should empower users to appropriate and subvert those networks for alterior agendas. This essay, and the activism it introduces, demonstrates an appropriation of Pinterest, a "pinboard-style" social media network, for the purposes of suberting and exposing its typical hetero-normatie and pro-consumer practices.  Â

The Image-World: A Found Comic Poem, Franny Howes

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

The text of this comic is excerpted entirely from Susan Sontag's essay, "The Image World," from her 1977 book On Photography. I was assigned to read and respond to this piece when I attended the Adventure School for Ladies Comics Intensive, an alternative graduate program focused on gender, labor, and the comics industry.Sontag's essay critiques the way contemporary western culture uses photography for "imprisoning reality" and "depersonalizing our relation to the world." Photography creates another reality by the physical impression of light on film: what she calls the "image world." The idea of a separate and additive reality created through …

The 5-Sided Lego, Hanna Barker, Shawn Beaumont

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

The study of rhetoric usually concerns itself with analysis of discourse more clearly identifiable as a text, but often overlooked is how apparently non-textual elements may shape our own personal narratives. However, rhetorical theory can indeed be applied to something like LEGO, that beyond marketing and branding, most people do not immediately consider textual. Ultimately by using the Burkeian pentad as a terministic screen, this project aims to determine how the act of playing with LEGO, and even the LEGO brick itself, serve to construct realities, and how those realities impact our own.

Subversive Liminality And Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up As Resistance To Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project plots the coincidence of the "zombie renaissance" and system-justifying nationalist rhetoric post-9/11. The project discusses this cultural cross-section with zombie mash-up fiction, using masculinity and trauma theories, in an attempt to illuminate the motives of "us vs. them" rhetoric and hypermasculine revenge narratives in the post-9/11 decade. First, I use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009) to examine liminality as subversive counter-discourse to the masculine hegemony post-9/11. Second, I use Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) to look at the effects of revenge culture and how non-emphasized femininity and hegemonic (hyper)masculinity co-construct each other.

Examining Gender In Pharmaceutical Rhetoric Through A Cultural Studies Lens: A Case Study On The Gardasil Vaccine, Jennifer Fickley-Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On June 8, 2006, Merck announced the debut of Gardasil, the world's first vaccine found successful in preventing human papillomavirus (HPV) infections, a sexually transmitted infection that is one of the main causes of certain cancers in men and women, including cervical, vulvar, penile and anal cancers. To promote the vaccine's release, Merck launched Gardasil's "One Less" advertising campaign that included television commercials, print ads and a consumerfocused website (www.Gardasil.com), each promoting the message that "you" could now be "one less woman" affected by cervical cancer ("One Less" campaign). The vaccine, tested and approved only for females age 9-26, was …

Gender And Race, Online Communities, And Composition Classrooms, Jill Anne Morris

Wayne State University Dissertations

As the culmination of a two-year long Internet ethnographic study of three separate sites, I use examples of women and minorities fighting against discrimination online to explore the power structures inherent to networks and how these might affect classroom practice. I will show how our ordinary assumptions in rhetoric and composition as well as computers and writing about the necessity of safe spaces in fostering communication about gender and race and safety for people of color and women online might actually be harming the rhetorical effectiveness of these writings. To focus this discussion, I will develop three case studies and …

Why The Duke Lacrosse Scandal Mattered — Three Perspectives [Reflections On The Duke Lacrosse Case -- Toward An Ethic Of Empathy], Heather Lee Branstetter

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

When a controversial event forces the contemporary American public to engage with important socio-political issues that intersect with constructions of race, gender, and class, the underlying social conditions too often remain unexamined. Our public discourse instead works to sensationalize and polarize discussion of such events; as an effect, participants in the discourse engage in rhetorical strategies that rely on the emotions of indignation, anger, and blame. This essay looks back to the discursive exchanges that arose in response to the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006. I analyze three "representative" patterns of public response, while also interpreting the cultural conditions that …

An Inquiry Into Discourse Choices As Indicators Of Gender Attitudes In A Non-Profit Conservative Christian Business, Dawn Marie Kruger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an inquiry into the discourse styles of men and women who work together in a conservative Protestant Christian business. Many conservative Protestant Christian churches teach that the Bible forbids women from holding positions of authority over men. Yet in the communications department of this particular business, women fill the top three management positions, supervising a mixed-gender staff of 15. Research has shown that men and women subconsciously use language markers that indicate personal attitudes toward the same and the opposite genders. This research project draws on that information while it analyzes the oral and electronic discourse of …