Date of Award
5-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design
Committee Chair/Advisor
Ufuk Ersoy
Committee Member
Aga Skrodzka
Committee Member
David Blakesley
Committee Member
W. Gary Griswold
Abstract
This dissertation rhetorically analyzes discrimination in Western institutional discourses and documentation procedures, such as architectural texts and procedures, through a historiographic lens. An analytical methodology will be offered to show how discrimination of intersectional bodies is historically informed and reaffirmed by the manipulation of Western myths and mythos. Specifically, by mapping navigational mathematics and cartographic methods over rhetorical, architectural, and historiographic theory, it will be shown how the manipulation of Western myths establishes and reifies patriarchal discrimination that eventually fissions into eugenicist logics in nineteenth and twentieth century France, England, and the United States. In modernity, the practice of manipulating myths in institutional discourses devolves into the practice of manipulating institutional discourses, themselves, in bureaucratic procedures, measurements, documents, laws, legislation, and literacy. The result of this transference of manipulation, from myths to laws, is patriarchal authority becomes weaponized with the means to categorize intersectional bodies but then recategorizes intersectional bodies, at whim, to serve the demands of the patriarchy. Focusing first on the social negation of disabilities, but then all intersectional bodies, this new methodology charts-out the ways de facto discrimination against disability, in reality, becomes de jure discrimination in institutional discourses and procedural bookkeeping. The purpose of this method is to locate such bodies, who are continuously purged to the social margins, with mathematical certainty.
Recommended Citation
Rader, Nicholas, "The Myth of Perfection: Charting the Rhetoric of Veteran Disability for a Course to Stability" (2023). All Dissertations. 3267.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/3267
Included in
Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Disability Studies Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Other Legal Studies Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, Social Justice Commons, Sociology Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons