Krista Ratcliffe’s term “non-identification” offers a version of identification that assumes identity is not always identifiable. As an attitude that fosters cross-cultural listening, non-identification asks us to listen to others from a place of “neutrality,” with “hesitancy,” “humility,” and “pause” in order to consider identity’s fluid nature (73). This thesis first argues that this term might also describe speaking strategies premised on non-identifiability. As I’ll show, an inventive non-identification would articulate some rhetorical strategies that neither “identification” nor “disidentification” currently articulate. However, rhetorical scholars need more theoretical and practical guidance for what this kind of speech looks like. So, this thesis also argues why, despite criticism to the contrary, the writing of Kenneth Burke offers an ideal account for inventive non-identification. Burke’s descriptions of the terms “synecdoche function,” the “mystic” and “poetic language” achieve the same effects as Ratcliffe’s non-identification, yet Burke describes these same effects from the perspective of the speaker. Following my re-reading of Burke, I ground the theory of inventive non-identification in a brief rhetorical analysis of Yan Phou Lee’s 1887 autobiography When I Was a Boy in China. By showing how this theory applies to Asian American rhetoric, I conclude that inventive non-identification has utility for the field of rhetoric more broadly.

In The Rhetorical Making of the Asian/Asian American Face: Reading and Writing Asian Eyelids, I examine representations of East Asian blepharoplasty in online video in order to gain a sense of how cultural values change over time. Drawing on scholarship in and around rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian American rhetoric, cultural studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory alongside qualitative data analysis of approximately fifty videos and the numerous viewer comments that accompany them, this study is a rhetorical analysis of the discourse on East Asian blepharoplasty in online video. These videos--ranging from mass media excerpts and news reports, to journals of healing and recovery, to short lectures on surgeon techniques, to audience commentary--offer insight into how social time is negotiated in the cross-cultural public sphere of YouTube. I do my analysis in two steps, first looking at how rhetors rationalize the decision to get blepharoplasty, and second, examining the temporal logics that ground these rationalizations. As result, I've identified five tropes through which people rationalize double eyelid surgery: racialization, emotionologization, pragmatization, the split between nature and technology, and agency. Moreover, I've identified at least five temporal logics that ground these tropes: progress, hybridization, timelessness, efficiency, and desire. Using these two sets of findings I build a framework for the analysis, production and organization of multimodal representations of bodies.