The goal of my dissertation is to further our understanding of the political ramifications of women's running stories by focusing on the intersections of feminist rhetoric, women in sports studies, political theory, and ontology. To this end, I examined six books written by women, about women, who participate in the sport of running. Since I am most interested in how gendered concepts teach us how to be "appropriate," and due to the fact that what is considered appropriate gendered behavior changes over time, I start from a place of understanding that "appropriateness" is necessarily both hegemonic and unstable. As a feminist rhetorical critic, I am foremost concerned with gendered relations of power, and am interested in working to move those relations towards the democratic end of liberty and equality. This dissertation examined the following five research questions: First, how do women articulate their running identities in the stories they tell? For example, do women depict running as central or influential to their self-concepts, roles, identities, ambitions and/or goals? If so, how? Specifically, what identities, concepts, or themes are common across stories? Second, do individual women explicitly discuss, or implicitly allude to, multiple identities or roles? If they embrace multiple identities or roles, how do they rhetorically navigate among them in the stories they tell? Third, how, if at all, do women articulate their experience of gender norms? Fourth, what are the points of possible contention, clash or disagreement in the discussion of women runners' experiences? How might the various perspectives that women (and others around them) express be in legitimate (agonistic, pluralistic) conversation with each other? And finally, in what ways might these stories hint at ontological change as a real possibility, and/or provide a canvas for an agonistic and plural relationship with the self and others? In other words, what commitments, goals, beliefs, and/or values do different perspectives have in common, that might bring them together to work for mutually-agreed upon change in the world, or in the political order? Upon completion of this dissertation, my feminist rhetorical analysis provided ample evidence that the texts I examined are clearly consciousness-raising documents, as their sole purpose is sharing stories of how women journey through life via running. This project illustrated that a particular kind of consciousness is raised when women's bodies are running, sometimes alone, but often together. This consciousness provides a freedom for these women to be more whole, strong, and authentic versions of themselves; running gives way to a mental and physical strength that these women may not have found otherwise. While for some rhetors and audiences, the essential question of women and girls' participation in sports looms large, for many other people, the issues have broadened and deepened from the original `to play or not to play,' and now encompass subtler concerns, from the wearing of the hijab in athletic competition to whether or not women should train during pregnancy. The female body is constantly on display and up for debate, and the female body in the realm of sports is no exception. Together, feminist rhetorical criticism and agonistic pluralism provided me with the foundation to creatively analyze women's running stories for their political and feminist ramifications, places where women are celebrated and heralded as strong athletes, as well as point out places where liberty and equality are still lacking.

abstract: The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

Recovering the lost voices of marginalized groups and integrating them into history helps reshape social constructs of the past, revitalize historiographical practices, and rethink spaces of exclusivity. Using an archival methodology and a feminist rhetorical lens, this thesis recovers the history of College Temple, a nineteenth-century women’s college located in Newnan, Georgia, and the women who attended the school, examining how the local space contributes to both rhetoric and composition’s larger historical narrative and modern practices. Though in existence a mere thirty-six years (1853-1889), College Temple provided its student with several contemporary opportunities, particularly within the realm of composition, contributing to their sense of agency and ethos. Exploring this contribution demonstrates the importance of the microhistory, serving as a call to further this type of research.

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World War II women are commonly understood to have come closer to equality than any previous generation. Their mass entry into the workforce is remembered as a united front to support the troops while simultaneously claiming ground to demonstrate their abilities as workers. However, scholarship which emphasizes the collaboration between the government and advertisers to create propaganda that persuaded women to enter the workforce and thus serve as the "domestic front" of the war begins to question the prevailing notion of wartime employment as strides towards equality. This project begins with the question: why did post-war women seemingly willingly abandon these jobs and move to the suburbs? I argue the construct of the post-war housewife, which positions women as willing to abandon careers for the suburban kitchen, is a social imaginary which responds to and uses social anxieties to constrain women’s gender performance and silence gender anxieties. I use the context of the time, as well as rhetorical analysis of mediated artifacts of representations of housewife, to argue this social imaginary silences women’s post-war lived experience and replaces it in public discourse with the multimodal image of Fifties housewife. A visual rhetorical analysis of post-war advertisements which portray the housewife reveals the work of the social imaginary using social anxieties concerning gender roles as well as Cold War fears to define woman’s place. Examining the way Hollywood uses housewife as a frame for its female stars uncovers how circulated use of the imaginary of housewife perpetuates the imaginary by seeming to evidence its claims to representation. However, an analysis of televised representations of the housewife imaginary reveals the fabric of the imaginary fraying. Television humor illuminates the illusion of the imaginary of housewife’s claims to representativeness, and therefore creates a public space in which women can contest the imaginary by exposing women’s discontent with the role of housewife. I conclude with a discussion of the ways this social imaginary of housewife continues to define women’s lives in political debate seventy years after it began to define and constrain post-war women’s gender performance.

I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins later coined “Black feminism” through strong female characters that refuse to be defined by society. This thesis seeks to add Jessie Fauset to the canon of Black feminists by using Collins’ theories on Black feminism to analyze Fauset’s first two novels, There Is Confusion and Plum Bun.

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