School of Communication and Multimedia Studies

The negative impact of human activities on the Earth's ecosystems has gained more attention in the last few decades; in turn interest and scholarship in the area of environmental rhetoric has also grown. This case study provides an in-depth examination of outreach material generated by Tampa Bay Watch to determine if grassroots environmental organizations are using rhetorical appeals that recent scholarly literature argues are ineffective. Alternative rhetorical appeals are also examined for their persuasiveness. Using an open coding approach, the analysis finds that the organization used persuasive appeals which varied from those predicted by the literature, and that a combination of appeals produced better results that any one appeal alone. The group also varied its appeals based on the type of outreach. The study reveals that qualitative study of one organization's persuasive appeals renders more nuanced findings than have quantitative studies of multiple organizations or analyses of single rhetorical documents.

This thesis employs a star study of Meryl Streep, incorporating pertinent feminist, reception and culture-studies theories, to investigate biases within the Hollywood film industry. The actress has enjoyed a resurgence as a leading lady at age 61. Streep's star persona, acting prowess and career arc are examined across three theoretical platforms - production of culture, textual analysis, and audience analysis - or clues as to why she has been singled out among her peers. This thesis posits that Streep's unique star image and surge in popularity have helped her break out of hegemonic articulations of gender and aging that privilege youthful beauty, putting female stars at a disadvantage within the capitalistic film industry. Also considered is the cultural significance of Streep's late-life success: Does she represent new openings for older actresses (and concomitantly, an increase in film representations of aging women), or is she merely an anomaly within the entrenched patriarchal system?

Snapped, a documentary style show profiling female killers, is one of Oxygens longest running hit franchises. This thesis analyzes, through both the frames of feminist theory and rhetoric, the way the show perpetuates and plays upon the myth of feminine evil as well as the stereotype of women as weak, hysterical agents in need of control. Snapped showcases women who start out as seemingly normal but then enact horrendous crimes. The use of women that the audience can identify with but then later fear creates a cathartic experience in which female audience members can be vicariously cleansed of any dangerous animosity they may possess. The show portrays the many extreme examples as the norm for lethal female violence, but this disregards the fact that a majority of women killers act in self defense. The show distorts the reality of violence against women and supports a stereotype of inherent female criminality.

Reality television programming chronicling the daily workings of multiple birth families within American culture has gained notoriety in recent years. Such programs, especially Discovery Health and TLC's 17, 18 Kids and Counting and TLC's Jon and Kate Plus Ei8ht, film, edit and broadcast the "everyday" life of these families. This research study focuses attention on hegemonic ideologies surrounding family values, motherhood, gender roles and religious faith, illuminated through textual and audience analysis. Working from an interdisciplinary approach combining feminist media and cultural studies, this study finds that hegemonic notions of family values, gender representations, religious faith and conceptions of motherhood are evident to varying degrees in the television texts and accepted by fans who negotiate their meanings online.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of the Western representation of the Kosovo conflict and its resolution in the year 1999. By reviewing political, scholarly and media rhetoric, the thesis examines how the dominant narrative of "genocide in Kosovo" was created in Western discourse, arguing that it gained its persuasive force from the legacy of the collective memory of the Holocaust. Using the framework of Kenneth Burke's theory of Dramatism and Walter Fisher's theory of the narrative paradigm, this thesis aims to understand how language, analogy and collective memory function in rhetoric to shape audience perceptions and guide political and military action. The study illustrates the mechanics of the operating rhetoric by analyzing two primary sources, the rhetoric of U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

This study will focus on Quentin Tarantino's three most recent films: Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), and Death Proof (2007). These works are significant, in that they present a marked departure from the director's earlier films. Specifically, they offer portrayals of resourceful and powerful female protagonists, in stark contrast to the frequently neglected and marginalized women of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Buttressed by a mixture of psychoanalytic feminist and postmodern theories, I will perform a careful textual analysis of these latest films. In particular, I intend to uncover the ways in which Tarantino's films support and/or subvert traditionally oppressive conceptions of gender.

This study uses Karlyn Campbell's concept of feminine rhetorical style as a theoretical framework for analyzing the rhetoric of Barbara Bush's 1990 Wellesley College commencement address. Through a systematic evaluation of Barbara Bush's speech, this study reveals that her rhetoric exemplifies feminine rhetorical style. The analysis also concludes that Barbara Bush's personal tone, specifically her use of narrative and humor, is the most useful and effective characteristic of her feminine rhetorical style. Using feminine rhetorical style, Barbara Bush successfully dissipates some of the tension she faced prior to the graduation ceremony at Wellesley College. Therefore, this study reveals that feminine rhetorical style is an attractive alternative for speakers seeking to build identification in hostile situations when identification is, or appears to be, lacking.

The thesis provides a cultural analysis on the micropolitics of Yugoslavia wars in 1992-1995, examining local and global media coverage along with grassroots and historical dimensions. The study offers an extensive overview of scholarly literature on the Balkans, arguing that often omitted local, cultural and historical narratives of the war events reveal complex perspectives on the rationales provided on civil war. Investigating the nationalist social movements in Yugoslavia (1992-1995), the thesis articulates the need to revisit Deleuze and Guattari's framework of micropolitics to understand the cultural and historical dimensions operational in such movements. The study presents local media coverage in Nasa Borba, Borba, and Hrvatsko Slovo, focusing mainly on two major atrocities committed during the Balkan conflict, in order to shed light on the complex role of discourse emerging in war environments.

The politicized use of humor in accented cinema is a tool for negotiating particular formations of identity, such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. The body of work produced by contemporary women filmmakers working in Australia, specifically Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law, illustrates how these directors have employed critical humor as a response to their multiple marginalization as women, Australian, and accented filmmakers. In their works, humor functions as a critical tool to deconstruct the contradictions in dominant discourses as they relate to (neo)colonial, racist, globalized, patriarchal, and displaced pasts and presents. Produced within Australian national cinema, but emerging from experiences of geographical displacements that defy territorial borders, their films illuminate how critical humor can inflect such accepted categories as the national constitution of a cinema, film genre, and questions of exile and diaspora. Critical humor thus consti tutes a cinematic signifying practice able, following Luigi Pirandello's description of umorismo, to decompose the filmic text, and as a tool for an ideological critique of cinema and its role in (re)producing discourses of the nation predicated on the dominant categories of whiteness and masculinity. The study offers a theoretical framework for decoding humor in a film text, focusing on the manipulation of cinematic language, and it provides a model for a criticism that wishes to heighten the counter-hegemonic potential of cinematic texts, by picking up on the humorous, contradictory openings of the text and widening them through a parallel dissociating process.

The rise in popularity of the female sleuth television programs makes it important to explore representations of gender and knowledge. This investigation analyzes interpretations of intuition in the television sleuth genre and relevant paratexts, examines gendered public and private spheres and raises broader questions about gendered knowledge in the series Medium, Crossing Jordan, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Veronica Mars, Monk, The Profiler and True Calling. Rooted in feminist cultural studies, historical and sociological analysis, television and film theory and work on the detective genre, this investigation establishes common frames, or filters, through which the television sleuth genre represents intuition and the gendered experience of knowledge. Women with intuition are depicted as unstable, dangerous and mentally ill. Though framed similarly, intuitive men have more freedom. This study expands on academic research on television representations of gender and knowledge. Societal implications include further understanding of meaning-making in regard to gendered knowing.