Barrios, Barclay

In identifying ways to create inclusive spaces in the classroom, instructors should not be limited by singular modes of discourse to engage students. Particularly when teaching first-year students who seek to invent the university and claim their intellectual space within it, these considerations must be deeply integrated into the course curriculum and not seen as an extended project to be optional or added at the end of a semester. Rather, instructors must find ways to integrate multimodal discourses in the first-year composition course as a foundation of learning.
One way to do this is to engage students in multimodal practices of rhetorical appeals. This dissertation examines the theories and practices of emotional appeal, namely pathos, to construct meaning-making opportunities that transcend gatekeeping endeavors of singular modes of persuasion.
Through the transmission of affect, students can be given the opportunity to affectively respond through various modes of discourse in applying emotional appeal to practices of persuasion.

This thesis examines the way several evangelical Christian universities (and evangelicalism more broadly) speak about and conceive of sexuality and gender in order to consider implications for their students. It argues that these universities consider nonheterosexual, non-cisgendered identities to be incompatibile with Christian identity and, consequently, grounds for denial of subjectivity. It analyzes the language of student handbooks and the universities’ rhetorical self-positionings and stagings necessary to maintain authority while engaging and exploring the lived experiences of several queeridentifying alumni—each of whom express feelings of “dehumanization” and cognitive dissonance. Finally, it considers how those subjected to messages of incompatible identities reconcile claiming both Christian and queer identities simultaneously.

An examination of ecocomposition reveals that despite being careful to embrace
all humans, it is still operating from a heterononnative standpoint. This perspective has
led to an exclusion of gay male writers from its place-based approach to the study of the
production of writing. By including the work of gay nature writer James Schuyler, the
boundaries of ecocomposition are expanded to include yet another way of moving
beyond restrictive cultural dualisms. Schuyler's work shows that definitions of
masculinity need to be expanded to include gay males, and also highlights how sexual
identity and setting interact to produce various interpretations of the self in one's writing.
An expansion of ecocomposition results in a truly liberatory theory and pedagogy, one
that encourages interactions that promote of all kinds of writing by all kinds of writers.

Although LBGTQ people currently experience unprecedented
visibility in American media and popular
culture, those representations depict flattened images
that reduce complex individuals into simplified and
limited categories of identity. I created this documentary
to blur and shatter the boundaries currently restraining
the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and
queer communities through the production of theoretically
informed photographic images. These pictures
form a response to pop culture tropes and misinterpretations
of the LGBTQ community. In totality, I
intend to pluralize and complicate notions of identity
and bodies.

This thesis explores the implications of visibility and invisibility of transgender people, their constructed bodies, and how these bodies are used for both personal
empowerment and education. By using various gender theorists for support, I argue that
the transgender male body obtains power through visibility. Despite the many obstacles
transgender males face, putting their bodies in a space of visibility gives them both
personal power and the power to educate others about their bodies and sexuality. In doing
a study of the human body and the different definitions applied to it, I show how we, as a
society, are restricted by gender binaries and how the transgender body serves as a gap
between the socially-constructed terms. Ultimately, transgender people are able to break
through these barriers by subverting the definitions and meaning of “male” and “female.”