Date of Award
5-1-2016
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Communication Studies
First Advisor
Gray, Jonathan
Second Advisor
Pensoneau-Conway, Sandra
Abstract
In U.S. America and much of the Western world, natural is a venerated symbolic placeholder for any number of assumed virtues and ideals. Present conflicts have brought forward questions about what natural (which I argue functions as an ideograph) should mean in contexts that seem to call for a formal, enforceable definition. In this study, I use the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the context of bodybuilding to work towards a theory of how ambiguous ideographs become "striated" or “crystallized.” Within this discussion I present instances where natural has been employed as a vehicle to cause harm, and I offer an advisement to rhetorical scholars on how we might approach striated ideographs in the future.
Access
This dissertation is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.