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This dissertation considers why several characters on the Early Modern Stage choose to remain silent when speech seems warranted. By examining the circumstances and effects of self-silencing on both the character and his/her community, I argue that silencing is an exercise of power that simultaneously subjectifies the silent one and

This dissertation considers why several characters on the Early Modern Stage choose to remain silent when speech seems warranted. By examining the circumstances and effects of self-silencing on both the character and his/her community, I argue that silencing is an exercise of power that simultaneously subjectifies the silent one and compels the community (textual or theatrical) to ethical self-examination. This argument engages primarily with social philosophers Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Badiou, and Emmanual Levinas, considering their sometimes contradictory ideas about the ontology and representation of the subject and the construction of community. Set alongside the Early Modern plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd, these theories reveal a rich functionality of self-silencing in the contexts of gender relations, aberrant sociality, and ethical crisis. This multi-faceted functionality creates a singular subject, establishes a space for the simultaneous existence of the subject and his/her community, offers an opportunity for empathetic mirroring and/or insight, and thereby leads to social unification. Silence is, in its effects, creative: it engenders empathy and ethical self- and social-reflection.
ContributorsKrouse, Penelope (Author) / Perry, Curtis (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Ayanna T (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora V (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay

California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay and lesbian movement for marriage as a civil right akin to those fought for by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Analogizing the gay and lesbian struggle for gay marriage with the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement exposed a complicated relationship between communities of color and gay and lesbian communities. This project reads critical rhetoric and intersectionality together to craft a critical intersectional rhetoric to better understand the potentialities and pitfalls of analogizing the gay rights with Civil Rights. I analyze television ads, communiques of No on 8 leadership, as well as state level and national court decisions related to gay marriage to argue alternative frameworks that move away from analogizing and move towards coalition building.
ContributorsKelsey, Michelle L (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Milller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who

At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large.

In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
ContributorsFlores, Carlos A (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron R (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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This dissertation explores the historical development and contemporary deployment of discursive practices that constitute the “truth” of addiction, which in turn serve as the bases for interventions into the lives of people who use intoxicants for any number of reasons. A number of interrelated research questions structure this governmentality analysis.

This dissertation explores the historical development and contemporary deployment of discursive practices that constitute the “truth” of addiction, which in turn serve as the bases for interventions into the lives of people who use intoxicants for any number of reasons. A number of interrelated research questions structure this governmentality analysis. First, what is the evolution of the governmental frames developed and deployed to understand, discipline, and recover addiction in the arena of alcohol and illicit drug use in United States? Second, how does twelve-step serve to transform unruly addicts into self-disciplining citizens? Finally, how does The Meth Project (TMP) exemplify and/or diverge from the dominant addiction governmental frames developed during the Temperance and Progressive eras in the United States? My overall goal is to destabilize our ready understanding of addiction and demonstrate that it is as much a tool of social needs as it is a mental illness by demonstrating: 1) the historically contingent nature of our understandings of addiction and addicts; 2) how these historically contingent understandings are actualized as technologies geared toward “recovering” unruly subjects; and 3) how these historically contingent understandings are taken up as “epistemological scripts” used to conceptualize the “true nature” of certain types of drugs and drug users while simultaneously supporting various regimes of discipline and punishment for those determined to remain “unruly subjects.”
ContributorsWalker, Michael F (Author) / Nadesan, Majia H (Thesis advisor) / Provine, Doris M (Thesis advisor) / Cavender, Gray (Committee member) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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The stillbirth of a wanted baby is a devastating and life altering experience that happens more than 26,000 times each year in the United States, but the impacts and implications of this loss on families is rarely discussed in public spaces. While another kind of pregnancy ending, abortion, dominates political

The stillbirth of a wanted baby is a devastating and life altering experience that happens more than 26,000 times each year in the United States, but the impacts and implications of this loss on families is rarely discussed in public spaces. While another kind of pregnancy ending, abortion, dominates political discourse about reproduction, the absence of talk about stillbirth prevention or support in those same contexts is worthy of further investigation. This project explores stillbirth as a communication phenomenon and draws upon narrative, performance and rhetorical articulations of testimony to extend our understanding of how narratives of stillbirth circulate in current conditions of discourse. A model for viewing how dominant and counter narratives circulate is explained (Narrative Loop Model) and a new model for illuminating the unique functions of testimony is given (Testimonial Loop Model). This dissertation employs performance and rhetorical methods to explore testimonies of stillbirth, both naturally occurring and solicited through interviews, in order to create several performance texts that put pregnancy-ending narratives in conversation with each other on stage. Analysis of the performance text and choices, as well as reflection on the embodied performance experience and member checking, yielded several findings. The discovery of somatic sentience and its influence on performance ethnography is discussed. Themes of relationality and temporality were found in the performance of testimonies of stillbirth. The implications of these findings add to the communication discipline’s understanding of how and why stillbirth testimony may circulate, its impact on conditions of discourse for pregnancy ending and its potential use as/in intervention, support, and advocacy. Ethical considerations and limitations are addressed.
ContributorsPullen, Suzanne (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Lederman, Linda (Committee member) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
In 1981, Fernando Valenzuela had one of the most unlikely rookie seasons for theLos Angeles Dodgers. Originally from a rural farm town in northern Mexico, he left an enduring legacy that persists within Mexican/American and Latinx fans and communities throughout Los Angeles. Not only did Fernando help the Dodgers capture

In 1981, Fernando Valenzuela had one of the most unlikely rookie seasons for theLos Angeles Dodgers. Originally from a rural farm town in northern Mexico, he left an enduring legacy that persists within Mexican/American and Latinx fans and communities throughout Los Angeles. Not only did Fernando help the Dodgers capture the World Series, he captured the hearts of the people and the communities who had shunned the Dodgers for decades. This act of protest was a response to the destruction of three neighborhoods—La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop—that were destroyed amid a protracted legal battle with the city of Los Angeles throughout the 1950’s that culminated in coercion, violence, and a new baseball stadium. This project intends to remember the neighborhoods of La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop and those who lost their homes alongside the public memory of Fernando Valenzuela’s unlikely rookie season, dubbed Fernandomania, and his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. I illumine how the public memories of Fernandomania, a moment of communitas, and Fernando Valenzuela have facilitated the public forgetting of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop by making Chavez Ravine into a novel public idiom for American baseball rather than a site of violence and resistance. In the process of facilitating the public forgetting of these neighborhoods, the sports media commits a pernicious discursive violence upon Fernando Valenzuela’s hyper-visible brown body that reveals the workings of a white racial frame designed to protect American baseball’s white masculine ideology. Ultimately, the Los Angeles Dodgers benefit from Fernando’s unmistakably cultural and racial Mexican identity—the source of his otherization and incongruity with American baseball’s white heroism—as the transgressions of the past are slowly forgotten.
ContributorsZamora, Erin Victoria (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Meân, Lindsey J. (Committee member) / Ore, Ersula J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Since its implementation in 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) has greatly informed preservation practice in the United States. As a primary text for the professionalization of the field of preservation, it not only acts as a law, but establishes an ideological framework that informs practices which impact

Since its implementation in 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) has greatly informed preservation practice in the United States. As a primary text for the professionalization of the field of preservation, it not only acts as a law, but establishes an ideological framework that informs practices which impact public memory in the US by determining what places remain, how they are transformed (or not), and whose stories they tell. The objective of this study is to explore the communicative dimensions of the NHPA to better understand how its rhetoric informs practice, and thus, informs public memory in the US. This study employs a meta-method of crystallization which engages a range of analysis methods. First, I conducted a close rhetorical analysis of the NHPA’s text which provided insight into ideologies within the law, opportunities for practice, and limitations on practice through the law’s definitive conceptualization of public memory. Next, I completed a qualitative case study of a preservation organization. I participated in extended field observation, conducted interviews with organizational staff, and engaged in walking methods in the city. The analysis offered insight into local discourses (everyday talk) which built into Discourses (ideologies) and demonstrated how the NHPA informs d/Discourses of preservation, even when it is not required. Although local practice was informed by the NHPA, the analysis also revealed methods for challenging and resisting the NHPA. Finally, I engaged in arts-based methods to examine how National Register listings (products of the NHPA) provide aesthetic and narrative precedents for determining ‘significance’ and worth in preservation practice. Through a poetic exhibition entitled Mythed Places, I artistically analyzed the NRHP, arguing that by giving historic sites the quality of myths, the NHPA attempts to arrest multiple unfolding narratives of places in service of a national myth. This project demonstrates that the NHPA communicatively constructs US preservation practice through its ambiguity, implied morality, and formation of a mythic national community. Although the current structure requires preservationists, even those not legally bound to the NHPA, to work within its framework, this study showcases ways to disrupt the discursive boundaries and practice preservation more critically.
ContributorsWheeler, Ashley (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Zanin, Alaina C (Committee member) / McHugh, Kevin E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021