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The cultural dominant that is neoliberalism has invariably influenced the field of contemporary American literature. Criticism on literature engaged with neoliberalism, including two prominent collections by Kenney and Shapiro and Huehls and Greenwald Smith, tends to employ a market-oriented lens that both assumes a specific corpus of literature (i.e., novels with white, male, middle-class, postmodern characters) and organizes itself around a specific set of themes (i.e., rising middle-class precarity, American global hegemony, human capital and biopolitical narratives, and the increase in individual perspectives). This dissertation intervenes in the field by offering a new approach to reading literature engaged with neoliberalism through the lens of trauma. Specifically, I analyze the traumatic impact of neoliberal social transformations, including the spread of surveillance technology, border trade policy, and war, in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007), and Mario Acevedo’s The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006). I show how in these novels, characters who face an existential struggle to survive these neoliberal initiatives are forced through traumatic experiences to acquiesce to the demands of a neoliberal world in ways that permanently damage their psychological health. This trauma-informed approach takes as its critical point of departure Naomi Klein’s political argument that violence is the ubiquitous precursor to the creation of a neoliberal world and neoliberal subjects. Unlike most other scholars of neoliberalism and literature, I pay special attention to authors and characters of Latinx and other marginalized backgrounds because their novels better represent the vulnerable communities most impacted by neoliberal initiatives. This dissertation thus invites readers to understand that the literature of neoliberalism is considerably less white and les

Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants, focuses on the lives of subjects who are rendered impossible within national imaginaries: LGBTQ migrants. I argue that while LGBTQ migrants do not escape the frameworks of the nation-state, they are nevertheless not bound to it. Through textual analysis of cultural productions by and about LGBTQ migrants, I demonstrate how they establish relational bonds as a tool for survival. As I suggest, relationality demands a careful engagement with difference; thus, women of color feminism and queer of color critique guide my analysis of these texts. My dissertation engages the coming together of trans women and gay men at the U.S.-Mexico border through the embodiment of femininity in the 2017 Trans Gay Caravan; the flexible subject positions and identity practices of undocuqueer migrants in film and digital media; the use of sitios y lenguas (spaces and discourses) by migrant and diasporic lesbians in film that enable them to reclaim their differences on their own terms; the strategic use of material object relations to express an impossible subject position of non-belonging; and finally, I analyze how a queer migrant performer reconceptualizes dominant notions of personhood by challenging nation-state documents. Throughout my dissertation, I ask: What can we learn about nation-state formations from the vantage point of LGBTQ migrants? What are the possibilities of creating sites of subversion within the regulatory structures of the nation-state? And how can power emerge from the very subjects who are rendered impossible in the national imaginary? It is the impossible and fabulous lives of LGBTQ migrants that construct new subject positions from which egalitarian social relations are built across differences. Most importantly, Unruly Imaginaries contends that relationality offers a blueprint for LGBTQ migrants to survive and thrive in their everyday lives.

This dissertation forwards a DJ-based hip-hop methodology as an intervention within the discourses of Writing Program Administration (WPA). It is a response to calls from the larger field of rhetoric and composition as well as the sub field of WPA for work that theorizes through disciplinary issues of whiteness, suggesting that hip-hop as a culture founded within the same western discourse of the academy has the capacity to interrogate the practices that reproduce and uphold hegemony. I argue that hip-hop can only accomplish this when it is first theorized through a synthesis of hip-hop feminism and critical theory since its proximity to dominant discourse must be unpacked and theorized rather than abandoned. This project also centers on hip-hop’s remixing capabilities as it argues that critiques should include an element of extension and creation as a willful ignorance or removal from the effects of dominant culture might be theoretically impossible. Instead, it argues that the critiques of WPA discourse offers occasions for compositions that are sensitive to differences in cultural location. The central argument in Breaks, Samples, and Sites for Cyphers is that the methodologies that guide practice and production within WPA must consider the intricacies of cultural location. The discourse of WPA is often presented as a neutral endeavor with practices that discipline administrators, students, teachers, and staff so that they might uphold middle-class, white norms. A hip-hop methodology has the potential to disrupt this practice by offering remixes of writing and identity that are sensitive to a variety of social and political contexts. The DJ is then specifically utilized as an image of a critical writing administrator due to their ability to invite spacious compositions from a variety of identities, packaging and presenting those compositions in ways that might speak back towards legacies of whiteness within the field. In chapter two, I begin the discussion by def

This project is an analytical history of the discourse of media panics that have affected comics-like forms in the mid- to late-1800s, comic books in the mid-1900s, and comics media in 1990s and the contemporary moment. The study of these media panics shapes a theory of nerd culture in general and comics culture specifically in order to better understand the delicate and foundational dialectic that sustains a consumer identity that is paradoxical in its indulgence in and animosity towards popular culture. With its historical formation in mind, this project explores the formation of geek chic as a consumer identity that, in many ways, troubles and even threatens the status quo of nerd culture.

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's E

By using Foucauldian critical discourse analysis along with Stuart Hall's theories of representation, I investigate the meanings that Yaqui representations reproduce and how they develop a discourse of Yaquinesss: the set of terms through which Yaquis came to be understood as subjects in Tucson. With the recognition era as a timeframe-the years between the onset of publicly visible Yaqui political action in Tucson in the early 1960s, to the early 1980s after official Yaqui recognition in 1978-this project argues that a discourse of Yaquiness during the recognition era expanded to include various meanings that reconstituted the Yaqui community and its survivance efforts. While a discourse of Yaquiness can be traced back to Tucson media representations that positioned Yaquis as marginal non-citizens, during the recognition era Yaqui self-representations emerged and circulated along with earlier meanings, sometimes rearticulating and challenging them, to reproduce the Tucson Yaqui community as an economically, politically, and culturally autonomous entity. I use Gerald Vizenor's definition of survivance as an active sense of presence over absence to interpret how the community's political, economic, and cultural initiatives assert Yaqui futures. This project identifies a discourse of Yaquiness through analyzing how Tucson print media representations reified Yaquis as marginal, non-citizens. However, Yaqui self-representations have also played a role in Yaqui survivance by accompanying and challenging the meanings produced by Tucson print media. This project examines how Yaqui representations added meanings to a discourse of Yaquiness that transformed as the community practiced survivance during the recognition era.

This dissertation, "Ban Hammer: Rhetorics of Community Management in the Computer Game Industry," argues that community management, as an emerging corporate discipline, manages community discourse to produce particular subject-consumer attitudes and behaviors. Employing a multi-perspectival, suspensionist methodology, this dissertation analyzes the discursive practices of community managers working in the computer game industry, along with the communities themselves, to discover how computer game communities and computer game development organizations employ a wide variety of rhetorical strategies as they attempt to exert power over one another. Drawing from a wide range of sources in the study of rhetoric, community management, fan studies, computer game development, psychoanalysis, new media studies, and professional communication, this project argues that community manager's inhabit a unique discursive space, one characterized by unresolved and unresolvable discursive tension, and that the work of community managers has an ever increasing importance to both the computer game development cycle and the production of fan communities.

This dissertation combines theories of nationalism and discourse analysis modeled on Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha with Kenneth Burke's dramatism to demonstrate that political states are constituted as meaningful, exclusionary communities through legislative discourses, literary representations, and practices of historiography. Although a number of scholars have acknowledged the importance of state identifications in the complex of cultural and symbolic nationalism, there has been limited examination of the composition of what I call "statist"-- as related to but distinct from "nationalist"-- identities in their own right. Using Wyoming as a case study, this project examines the unique and deeply significant affiliations formed within individual states in the United States of America. Wyoming provides an interesting lens for this discussion for several reasons. First, Wyoming's attainment of statehood in 1890 marks an important figurative closing of the frontier acknowledged in the census of that year and remarked upon as significant among many scholars of Western history. This coincidence of timing also places Wyoming's territorial period and attempts to articulate the state as an independent cultural and political entity during the period of colonialism. Many scholars, including Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha as well as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, consider this the period during which modern nationalism flowered. Finally, Wyoming presents a useful template for this analysis precisely because of its unremarkableness in legislative terms; the language of its constitution draws heavily on the models provided by earlier states as well as the US Constitution and is quite similar in this respect to many that followed. Although the symbols and narratives that circumscribe the Wyoming imaginary are unique, the process by which they are constituted is not and could be observed in some form in any state in the Union.

Narrating the Writing Center: Knowledge, Crisis, and Success in Two Writing Center Stories' is year-long comparative case study of two writing centers in the US and the UK and draws upon ethnographic and textographic methodologies. Using writing center documents such as annual management reports, websites, training materials, and interviews with writing center staff and administration, I investigate historical, cultural, and political influences on writing centers and trace moments of change in writing center history in order to contextualize the changes both writing centers faced in terms of funding, location, and identity. I examine traditional and contemporary epistemological paradigms that inform writing centers' everyday practices and underlying ideology that both correspond with and resist institutionally-sanctioned ways of knowing and institutionally-embedded ideology. Using documents and interviews from both sites, I explore the ways in which writing centers find themselves in a reactive position during crises, such as the crisis of access, of literacy, and of funding, rather than a proactive position. Drawing from frame analysis, I argue for reframing the narratives surrounding writing center identity and praxis through the use of code words which have the potential to align writing center praxis with institutional values and result in increased agency for writing centers during crises. I conclude with a blending of contemporary definitions of kairos and stasis in order to create a rhetorical method of writing center communication that can serve as a potential path toward writing center sustainability, and I offer current writing center administrators a heuristic for implementation.

This work focuses on Chican@ identity in academia and uses CRT counterstory to address topics of cultural displacement, assimilation, the American Dream, and ethnic studies. This research considers where the field of rhetoric and composition currently stands in terms of preparedness to serve a growing Chican@ undergraduate and graduate student population. Through counterstory, I offer strategies that more effectively serve students from non-traditional backgrounds in various spaces and practices such as the composition classroom, faculty mentoring, and programmatic requirements such as second language proficiency exams. Since rhetoric and composition can confront structurally and historically specific racisms--e.g., segregation, lack of access for the racial minority to higher education, ethnocentric curricula--embedded in our field, then we, as teachers, students, and administrators, can strategize ways to achieve social justice in academia for historically marginalized groups. My dissertation is focused on Chican@ undergraduate and graduate students because this is the fastest growing population in the academy and is a group with which I feel I can draw upon my cultural intuition; however, the critical race theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological strategies I make use of in my project can be adapted to assist other historically marginalized groups in academia.