In this thesis history performs that which Della Pollock terms historicity in her Introduction to Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History. History as historicity is no longer an evolutionary master narrative that dictates essential Truths. Rather, it is a site for performance where unfinalized and partial fragments of the past cluster into stories that mingle fact and fiction. Historicity defines a space or an event where history is a doing. The performer of this history embraces agency, which she uses to place herself within history rather than dominate or be dominated by it. Observing history as historicity, Joseph Roaches genealogies of performance provide a method for my analysis of the performances of debutante culture as I represented them in Etchings of Debutantes, a script I compiled, and the performance of that script. This thesis traces the historical performance of southern debutante culture by comparing and contrasting various texts and materials, included in my script, Etchings of Debutantes, as equal co-texts. The script is a belated response to my skeptical performance of a debutante at the Augusta Symphony Debutante Cotillion in Augusta, Georgia on November 26, 1999. At that time, I was assured by my mentor to one day be able to creatively engage dialogue with my performance of the debutante ritual. In 2001 I began the dialogue by collaging a script of icons, photographs, invitations, magazines, fairytales, personal narratives, music, dance, film, and literature. The following year, I staged the script in the Hopkins Black Box theatre at Louisiana State University. Learning about Joseph Roachs genealogies of performance shortly after, I found genes or themes in the script and performance to insight new ways of exploring and interrogating my history performing debutante culture. My thesis engages scholarly and performative discourse with the cultural performance of debutantes by observing various representations of debutante culture in the script and performance of Etchings of Debutantes. Etchings of Debutantes, followed by its staging and the writing of this thesis, are all part of my continuous dialogue with southern debutante culture.

This study analyzes the relationship between professional wrestling as performance and its fans. For decades, professional wrestling has been characterized as a fraudulent sport of scams and illusion rather than actual and fair competition between athletes. Why then is wrestling so popular? I pursue the question by taking a close look at professional wrestling in four different cultural venues or sites of production: the historical archive, the live wrestling event, the televised event, and the Internet. In each site, I focus on what components define professional wrestling, how they operate, and what appears to be their purpose. Drawing on Neil Harris's concept of an "operational aesthetic," I feature components that expose rather than veil their operations and thereby invite the audiences to scrutinize how they work. In addition to Harris, I call on several other theorists to articulate what operations are revealed, and the results or ramifications of the exposure. Roland Barthes and John Fiske help me understand the event as a "spectacle of excess." I also use Barthes' and Fiske's models of readerly, writerly, and producerly texts to analyze the relationship between the event and the fans. The theories and perspectives of Harris, Barthes, and Fiske summon aspects of Bertolt Brecht's aims for theatre. By means of devices that expose rather than veil the apparatus of theatre, Brecht hoped to provoke audience members to be like sporting experts in their passionate critical viewing of the event. The results of the study suggest that wrestling fans understand and value wrestling because it is a performance and because they play a part in producing it. Far from being duped by the wrestling illusion, fans are able to enjoy wrestling with a double voice, producing pleasurable meanings for themselves through critical detachment and critical detachment through pleasure.

Beyond Spalding Grays iconic position as a confessional performer, he serves as a representative character for a culture increasingly consumed with both self-reflection and self- disclosure, where confessional speech is understood as somehow more authentic or pure than other forms of discourse. I argue that confession is a performative, not a constative utterance (a doing not a saying) and that it is a productive not a libratory act; it does not free an already existing self, but produces a new self in the act of performance. Consequently, though the confessional performance style typified by Gray can be aesthetically compelling for audiences and politically constructive for performers, the power dynamics between performer and audience in confessional performance are far from benign. Care must be taken to ensure that the act of confession is ethically sound and artistically/intellectually productive. I begin by placing Grays work into a historical context. In Chapter 2, I trace some problematics of the confessional voice in academic, literary, religious, legal and psychoanalytic contexts. Chapter 3 examines some of the contentious issues of the confessional voice in Spalding Grays work, offering a reading of Its a Slippery Slope from a Foucaultian post-structuralist perspective. Finally I offer a reading of my own confessional performance work (inspired by and in response to Grays) which has been created using the emerging analytical idiom of haunting, and which I believe to be capable of resolving some of the generic problems of confessional discourse outlined in my study.

As change is an inevitable part of organizational life, this study explores one aspect of communication in organizational change: the creation and use of meaning during the change process. The implementation of a new, higher education admissions criteria framework of a state master plan is the specific change under study. University administrators, contracted consultants, and board staff members participated in the study. Framed by symbolic interactionism and a stakeholder perspective, I pose four research questions: RQ1: What meanings were created during the particular process of change under study? RQ2: How were meanings intentionally and unintentionally created among stakeholders during this organizational change? 2a: How do the various elements (e.g., documents, meetings, etc.) of organizational change interact with and influence one another during the change process? RQ3: How does the presence of similar and dissimilar meanings influence the change process? RQ4: From a symbolic interactionist perspective, how does the concept of multiple levels of power affect the process of creating meaning during organizational change? A qualitative approach, including interviews, text analysis, and observations was utilized to address these questions. In all, twenty interviews were conducted and fifteen texts reviewed for analysis. As a result of data analysis, categories of meaning were determined. These categories help to define the experiences of the participants and reveal subtle details of the interactions taking place among the stakeholders. The concept that meanings are created intentionally and sometimes unintentionally through the use (or lack) of symbols was also evident. Examples of symbols in this study include meetings, workshops, and written documents. Data analysis further revealed that both similar and dissimilar meanings were created through interactions. The existence of similar meanings helps to facilitate change processes while dissimilar meanings can hinder the process. Aspects of power are relevant to this study as evidence points to the concept that the type of power a person possesses impacts the meanings created. Several strategies for more effective communication in organizational change are suggested as a result of the findings from this study. Finally, implications for future research are included.

Masculinity is a multi-dimensional, fairly pliable construct that some scholars approach from a biological perspective, others approach from a social constructionist perspective, and others approach from a unifying perspective. Part of the environment that informs the meaning of masculinity to a given culture is the mass media. This study takes the constructivist theoretical perspective, which attempts to explain the activation of schemata. The schematic process for this study concerns how people perceive, process, and judge masculine signs. This study seeks to explain gender role orientations influences on the development of schemata for masculinity as evidenced by differences in assessments of differing masculine images. Participants (N = 747) rated their own sex role orientation and then assessed the sex role orientation and evaluated the masculine imagery. The results of this experiment reveal that gender role has a limited effect on schematic development for masculinity. Though gender role affects how we perceive our world, the extent to which it influences that perception is smaller than expected. Directions for future research are also offered.

Marking the site of death on the road with a shrine, an increasingly popular cultural practice in the United States, is a deeply personal, private affair, however, because shrines are placed in the public right-of-way, they attract attention and invite participation, comment, and criticism. These sites, the materials that mark them, how people come to build them, the messages that those who build them hope to convey, and the accumulative force these sites bring to bear in various contexts offer unique insights into our complex, fragmented, and often confounding relationships with death, living memory, and selective forgetting. This project takes roadside shrines, material cultural artifacts, as points of departure for a multi-track journey. This journey locates shrines on the road and in cultural imagination, in historical records and cultural mythology, and in the researchers personal archive. The construction of the text makes apparent the researchers cultural poesis and invites readers to participate in like manner. Chapter One situates roadside shrines within academic discourse, explains the construction of the written text, provides a brief review of literature pertinent to the study of roadside shrines, and describes the scale, scope and methods employed during the research process. Chapter Two describes roadside shrines from the perspective of the passer-by along two local routes and two cross-country road trips. Chapter Three examines the popularity of shrine-building in the vernacular and academic press, historicizes the practice of shrine-building, explores recent institutional attempts to regulate roadside shrines, and offers a provisional interpretation of shrine-building as resistant performances of protest and warning. Chapter Four explores roadside shrines from the perspective of the participant-observer engaged in various rituals while visiting specific roadside shrines and during additional cross-country road trips. Chapter Five examines shrine-building as social ritual in the popular and academic arts, historicizes shrine-building as a mourning ritual, offers a provisional interpretation of shrine-building as performances that resist normative constraints of healthy mourning while simultaneously re-inscribing a dominant formal aesthetic. Chapter Six restlessly concludes as the researcher returns to the field.

This dissertation explains theory and research concerning international teaching assistants, intercultural communication, nonverbal and verbal immediacy, cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning, and sex differences. One research question and five hypotheses were tested via MANOVA and correlation tests. Six hundred and seven undergraduate students completed instruments measuring verbal and nonverbal immediacy, and cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning. Results supported the research question and three of the five hypotheses. Specifically, U.S. Teaching Assistants used more nonverbal immediacy than International Teaching Assistants. Students attitudes toward International Teaching Assistants correlated with students learning. Students perceptions of ITAs and USTAs on verbal and nonverbal immediacy positively correlated to students learning.

Teacher immediacy has been positively associated with many desirable academic outcomes, including quality student-teacher relationships, student participation in the classroom and in extra-class interaction, and increased student learning. Thus, scholars have consistently encouraged educators to increase their use of immediacy in contacts with students. However, some previous research found that high levels of teacher immediacy can be problematic in relationships and detrimental to desirable educational outcomes. Immediacy behavior tends to promote personal relationships and inclusion. However, excessive immediacy may change the meaning that students receive from the behavior. Using a message interpretation perspective, this study examined how sex of the student and sex of the teacher effects students interpretations of teachers high immediacy behavior in both in-class and extra-class contexts. Results reveal that students interpret high immediacy from male teachers as control but the same behavior from female teachers is interpreted as caring. Students also perceive excessive immediacy as more inappropriate when it is from a male teacher than from a female teacher. Female students are more likely than male students to identify the high immediacy behavior as sexual harassment. Students are also more likely to interpret excessive immediacy as sexual harassment when it occurs in extra-class contexts, such as in the professors office or in informal contacts in the student center than in the classroom.

The study of southern rhetoric and public address remains important to the study of American rhetoric and public address. However, recent years indicate a decline in the amount and variety of scholarship in this area of study. This project provides a meta-critical analysis of the history of southern rhetorical scholarship, focusing mainly on southern public address. By tracing ideology from the Agrarians, Richard Weaver, Dallas Dickey, Waldo Braden, Stephen Smith, and Stuart Towns, clear attitudes and definitions of the South, southern identity and southern rhetoric evolved to create an area of study in much need of revision. The remainder of the project suggests theoretical approaches such as Maurice Charlands use of constitutive rhetoric and Linda Hutcheons theory of parody as just a sample of possible ways southern rhetorical studies may be further developed. These theoretical views are used in light of three case studies a grassroots organization known as the League of the South, a southern politician Senator Zell Millers speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and a 1919 African American education activist Charlotte Hawkins Brown. These case studies show the need for re-conceptualizing southern rhetoric and re-evaluating the limited canon now facing southern public address.

Perceptions of interpersonal dominance and affiliation have been extensively examined throughout past research. In the current study, the purpose was to fill in the some of the gaps of existing research well, specifically the gap created by current confusion in the literature regarding the effects of sex, status, and emotional display on ratings of dominance and affiliation. Also, interactions between the primary variables of interest (sex, status, and emotional display) were observed. Results revealed significant relationships within several of the dimensions addressed, specifically between emotional display and ratings of dominance and affiliation such that individuals displaying anger were viewed as more dominant than those displaying happiness whereas those displaying happiness were viewed as more affiliative than those displaying anger. Sex, both of the participant and of the source, affected ratings of affiliation and dominance such that women were viewed as more affiliative than men but men were viewed as more dominant than women. Results also revealed significant interactions such that overall ratings were mediated by the interactions between variables as well as by single variables. Also, the findings revealed a negative correlation between ratings of dominance and ratings of affiliation.