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Anxious rhetorics: (trans)national policy-making in late twentieth-century US culture

Dingo, Rebecca Ann
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1120579965

Abstract Details

2005, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
In 2003, a group of humanities scholars answered an urgent call by the US State Department to issue response to Homeland Security policies. The resulting document makes clear the benefits of bringing humanities criticism, methods, and knowledge to (trans)national policy making. My dissertation is one of the first in the field of rhetorical studies to explicate this benefit. “Anxious Rhetorics” examines the rhetorical dynamics of the policy-making process. Policy-making is not simply figurative; policy-makers hold the rhetorical power to structure—through public, legal, political, and administrative institutions— audiences’ collective and individual identities, value systems, senses of place, and material circumstances. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze the rhetorical strategies that frame late twentieth century policy hearings, testimonies, supportive pamphlets, hearings, and reports. I trace the shared rhetorical appeals among contemporary national welfare policies, international World Bank promotional materials and reports, and local university student rights initiatives, to highlight the common representational strategies that resonate with US audiences. Each site demonstrates the late twentieth-century shift in policy-making whereby the state is no longer responsible to its citizens because of their intrinsic value as citizens. Rather, the market supersedes the state as the central governing body and places value on its citizens as economic actors. My cross-textual investigation illustrates that policy-making is a rich genre of persuasion and a discursive practice that often produces and reifies gender, race, ability, and transnational inequalities. As a feminist rhetorical project, my study necessitates an interdisciplinary methodology. I blend classical and contemporary rhetorical studies of audience with feminist transnational cultural and post-colonial studies to produce a unique analytic strategy. My fusion of these disciplines enables a critical investigation of how policymakers craft their arguments both to appeal to a diverse US audience and to obscure the inequalities produced by globalization. I document how contemporary public initiatives appeal to US citizens’ deeply held values of personal responsibility, empowerment, and individualism. I argue that these appeals, however, reify what audiences already know and expect and thereby prevent audiences from recognizing the personal, material, ideological, and socioeconomic consequences produced by the late twentieth-century transnational economy.
Brenda Brueggemann (Advisor)
234 p.
Rhetoric; Cultural Studies; Feminist Studies; Transnational; Public policy; Post-Colonial

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dingo, R. A. (2005). Anxious rhetorics: (trans)national policy-making in late twentieth-century US culture [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1120579965

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dingo, Rebecca. Anxious rhetorics: (trans)national policy-making in late twentieth-century US culture. 2005. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1120579965.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dingo, Rebecca. "Anxious rhetorics: (trans)national policy-making in late twentieth-century US culture." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1120579965

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1120579965
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© 2005, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.