Anxious rhetorics: (Trans)national policy-making in late twentieth-century United States culture

In 2003, a group of prominent humanities scholars answered an urgent call by the US State Department to issue a formal, academic 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. In my dissertation, "Anxious Rhetorics," I examine 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 intricate 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 (Chapter Two), international World Bank promotional materials (Chapter Three) and reports (Chapter Four), and local university student rights initiatives (Chapter Five), 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 only as economic actors. My cross-textual investigation illustrates not only that policy-making is a rich genre of persuasion, but also that contemporary policy-making is 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 (Aristotelian) and contemporary (Burkian) 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.; As a whole, my project is valuable to rhetorical studies on at least three levels: (1) my analysis expands the field of rhetoric by demonstrating how theories of audience can advance current understandings of transnational policy studies; (2) my project furthers the field of transnational cultural studies by articulating a grounded rhetorical methodology that effectively defines the significant roles of audience, text, material circumstance, and context in the analysis of public discourse; and, (3) my work highlights the important links between the study of (trans)national policy and the pedagogical theory and praxis of the rhetoric and composition classroom.