New communication technologies have undoubtedly altered the ways in which persons interact and have had a profound impact on public life. Engaging this impact, much of the scholarly literature has focused on how these interfaces mediate interaction however, less is known about technology's modulating effects. The current project moves beyond mediation, underscoring how social relations are not only activated by technology, but are actuated by these interfaces. Through an extended case study of Portals, gold shipping containers equipped with audio-visual technology that put persons in digital face-to-face interaction with others around the globe, the current project engages such actuation, highlighting how the co-mingling of affect and technology generate new ways of noticing, living and thinking through the complex relationships of public life. The human/technology relations mediated/modulated by the Portal produce unique atmospheres that activate/actuate public space and blur the boundaries between public and private. Additionally, the atmospheres of the Portal generate a digital co-presence that allows for user/participants to feel with their interlocutors. This “feeling with” suspends user/participants in atmospheres of human connection through the emergence of an imaginative dialogue, and the curating of such atmospheres leads to dialogic transformation. As such, the Portal operates as an atmospheric interface. Engaging the concept of atmosphere attunes those interested in new communication technologies to the complex gatherings these technologies create, and the potentialities and pitfalls of these emerging interfaces on public life.

Among the hundreds of hymnals published in the United States during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1850), the first official hymnal of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a rare example of a hymnal compiled by a woman. The Latter-day Saints wanted a hymnal adapted to their unique beliefs and emerging identity, and Emma Smith—the wife of founding prophet Joseph Smith—was given sole charge of selecting the hymns. The hymnal is also significant because Emma Smith selected and arranged hymns from 1830–1835, years of an emerging rhetoric for the early women’s rights movement. Nevertheless, few studies attend to Smith’s agency and priorities as a compiler, being preoccupied with the contributions of W. W. Phelps, the editor, printer, and most represented poet of the hymnal.

Drawing on Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s theories of agency and of feminine style as well as Kenneth Burke’s theory of form, this thesis uses close textual analysis and coding to examine the rhetorical strategies Smith employed in the hymnal’s preface and in the organization of the Sacred Hymns section. The analysis reveals the hymnal’s recurring themes as well as the ideas it circulates about sex, gender, agency, and community inclusion/exclusion. It also uncovers tension between Smith’s and Phelps’ priorities for the hymnal, particularly in how Smith and Phelps characterize those who should and should not be included with equal authority in Zion, the ideal community the Latter-day Saints sought to build.

Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others to whiteness and western modernity are rooted in settler colonial histories and expansions of US and Anglo-European democracy. Informed by the rhetorical study of publics and public memory, critical race/whiteness studies, and transnational and Indigenous feminisms, this dissertation examines how memoryscapes of civilization and its Others circulate to shape geopolitical belongings in three cases: (1) public memory places in the US Southwest; (2) pro-Israel rhetorics enacted by the US organization Christians United for Israel; and (3) the embodied and mediated protests of European feminist organization FEMEN. In bringing these seemingly unrelated cases together as elements of a larger assemblage, I draw attention to their symbolic and material connectivities, examining the racialized, gendered, national, and imperial logics that move between these sites to shore up the frontiers of whiteness. Specifically, I argue for conceptualizing whiteness as a global assemblage that territorializes through settler colonial memoryscapes that construct "modern" national and global citizen-subjects as those deemed worthy of rights, protection, land, and life against the threatening bodies of Otherness seen to exist outside of the shared times and places of normative democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also examine, more broadly, how assemblage theory extends current approaches to studying rhetoric, public memory, and intercultural communication in global, trans
ational, and (post)colonial contexts.

The meaning of sexuality is not only specific to particular time periods in history; it is also culturally specific. Informed by transnationalism, queer of color critique, postcolonial feminism, and public sphere theory, my dissertation investigates the complex dynamic between what I call "Chinese queer subjects" and their bio-genetic families in a time of queer globalization. By centering the life experiences of Chinese queer subjects through interviewing and rhetorical analysis, this project intervenes in the teleological discourse of "coming out" that is circulated both in transnational LGBT movements and within academia. Through a materialist analysis of the "coming out" discourse in mainland China, I reveal why and how the discourse of "coming out" is prioritized in Chinese LGBT movements in order to foster a domestic queer market in mainland China. Of most significance to this project are the two non-confrontational strategies that some Chinese queer subjects employ to navigate the tension between family and sexuality: first, the reticent "coming with" strategy that engages the home space with queer desires, transforming the heteronormative family institution from within, toward a more livable queer life; second, the xinghun strategy, a marriage arrangement that many Chinese gay men and lesbian women partake in as a means of being gay or lesbian without exiting the family kinship system. The practices of reticent "coming with" and xinghun challenge the binary between family and sexuality, suggesting that queerness can emerge and thrive without exiting the (heterosexual) family; they give us some concrete examples of what AnaLouise Keating calls "post-oppositional politics" among some Chinese queer subjects.

While numerous studies have examined the nature of masculinity, scholars seldom seek to determine the meaning of manhood or to explore which types of individuals are culturally permitted to call themselves men. One scholarly approach suggests that the meaning of a cultural category can best be illuminated through examining marginalized examples within that category. Based on this assumption, this project illuminates cultural understandings of manhood in the United States by examining the experience of men within two marginalized categories--gay and transsexual--who have often found themselves fighting for the right to call themselves men at a time when hegemonic assumptions about manhood have required that one had been designated male at birth, claims a heterosexual orientation, and exhibits characteristics that are stereotypically masculine. For gay men who were born male, social marginalization could result from one's gay orientation as well as from a perceived lack of masculine traits. For some transsexual gay men, all three of the traditional markers of manhood may be absent or deemed insufficient. This scenario calls into question what it is that all men have in common if the concept of manhood is to be associated with any stable definition. Within rhetorical analysis, the concept of textual fragmentation suggests that a rhetorical critic performs an analysis of a text by examining dense textual fragments; the critic's audience members then produce what they perceive to be a finished discourse in their own minds. Along these lines, this project illuminates the concept of manhood by examining dense textual fragments found within mass media representations and personal narratives, and concludes that one's manhood is determined based on the degree to which one identifies with others who call themselves men. Therefore, manhood can best be framed, not as a specific identity with a stable definition, but as a body of intersecting identifications specific to a particular cultural location and time period. As such, it is linked to cultural systems of power and oppression, illustrating that the claim to manhood as an identity is a rhetorical act that is not free from controversy.