A Few Good Men and Women : the Rhetorical Constitution of Military Personnel Identity
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2015 A few good men and women : the rhetorical constitution of military personnel identity. Ashly Bender Smith University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Ashly Bender, "A few good men and women : the rhetorical constitution of military personnel identity." (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2094. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2094 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A FEW GOOD MEN AND WOMEN THE RHETORICAL CONSTITUTION OF MILITARY PERSONNEL IDENTITY By Ashly Bender Smith B.A., Texas State University – San Marcos, 2008 M.A., New Mexico State University, 2010 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English/Rhetoric of Composition Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2015 Copyright 2015 by Ashly Bender Smith All rights reserved A FEW GOOD MEN AND WOMEN: THE RHETORICAL CONSTITUTION OF MILITARY PERSONNEL IDENTITY By Ashly Bender Smith B.A., Texas State University – San Marcos, 2008 M.A., New Mexico State University, 2010 A Dissertation Approved on March 12th, 2015 by the following Dissertation Committee: __________________________________ Bronwyn T. Williams ___________________________________ Karen Kopelson ___________________________________ Debra Journet ___________________________________ Aaron Jaffe ___________________________________ D. Alexis Hart ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my family for their endless support and, also, to the men and women of the U. S. Armed Forces, whose presence in my life—not only as fellow citizens but also as family, friends, and students—inspired this project in the first place. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I first started thinking about this project, Dr. Bronwyn T. Williams told me a well-known parable about a rabbit whose director was a lion. I am deeply grateful that Dr. Williams agreed to be my director, the lion in my corner. His timely encouragement and advice—much, much more than just that first story—helped me to finish this project and this program. I would also like to thank Dr. Karen Kopelson and Dr. Alexis Hart for their careful reading and helpful feedback that pushed me to develop my ideas and the contributions in this project. I am also grateful to Dr. Debra Journet and Dr. Aaron Jaffe for their support and help through this entire process. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Nancy Wilson for hiring me as a writing center tutor and introducing me to the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Under her direction in the writing center and in her classes, I discovered a field that encouraged my commitment to working closely with students to help them become more effective communicators. Similarly, I am grateful to the many faculty who have guided my apprenticeship in this field through my graduate studies. I am also thankful for my colleagues at the University of Louisville who have supported me by listening to my hunches and reading my drafts in our dissertation group. Barrie Olson, Shannon Howard, Caroline Wilkinson, and Jessica Winck, in particular, have been especially gracious and helpful as I worked through this dissertation, and I am forever grateful to them. Finally, I would never have made it to this point without my family, who have supported me as I pursued ideas and theories they didn’t understand in places that are far from home. Since they are legion, naming all the family who listened and helped me through this process would likely take another dissertation. Still, their patience and love iv is a greater gift than I could ask for. And, of course, I am thankful to my husband, Daniel Smith, for being by my side and providing a calm center in the storm that graduate student life can often be. Here’s to our next adventure together. v ABSTRACT A FEW GOOD MEN AND WOMEN: THE RHETORICAL CONSTITUTION OF MILITARY PERSONNEL IDENTITY Ashly Bender Smith May 8th, 2015 In this dissertation, I examine the public negotiation of service member identity by multiple stakeholders as a way to better understand the available rhetorical strategies for affecting ideological constructions of identity. While current Rhetoric and Composition research attends mostly to student-veterans, I draw on cultural and rhetorical theorists, such as Louis Althusser, Kenneth Burke, Maurice Charland, to identify the rhetorical approaches used to construct military personnel identity, particularly in the post-9/11 era. Through analysis of films, recruiting materials, and the publicly-shared stories of personnel, I extend current understandings of constitutive rhetoric and rhetorical identification—which tend to focus on the work of the rhetor as he or she addresses a target, constituted audience—to consider the interventions made by other institutional and individual stakeholders. In the first two chapters, I provide the scholarly and cultural context for this dissertation. In the first chapter, I review cultural studies and rhetoric scholarship regarding ideology, rhetoric, and identity to form the groundwork for a study that enriches our understanding of not only military personnel but importantly of the way in which rhetors—as representatives of institutions and as individuals—negotiate, vi challenge, and shape ideological understandings. In the second chapter, I argue that the general ideological understanding of military personnel—as seen in film—is that they are physical, aggressive, and superior in their pursuit of morally-guided endeavors. This construction of military personnel identity establishes the basic perceptions of service members and forms the ideological definition that other stakeholders begin from when adding to or challenging common notions of personnel. Chapters Three and Four examine the rhetorical strategies and tactics used by the Military institution and military service members (acting as individuals and citizens) to intervene in dominant ideological constructions of their identity. Through an analysis of Military recruiting materials, I argue that the Military makes use of a unique form of constitutive rhetoric, which I call recruiting rhetoric, to refine the popular representations of military personnel. In Chapter Four, I examine the publicly-shared stories of American military personnel and the rhetorical features used therein which demonstrate that military service members’ primary intervening approach is the use of the stories to reshape the current topoi used in public discourse about service members. These efforts by current and former military personnel serve as models for the ways in which individuals can affect powerful ideological constructions of their identity and thereby facilitate the reproduction of more accurate public representations. In my concluding chapter, I discuss the implications that my analysis has for the development and extension of constitutive rhetoric and other rhetorical strategies used to shape ideological understandings of identity generally and of military personnel identity in particular. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................iv ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................vi CHAPTER I .....................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER II ....................................................................................................................28 CHAPTER III ..................................................................................................................62 CHAPTER IV ..................................................................................................................92 CHAPTER V ...................................................................................................................126 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................137 APPENDIX A ..................................................................................................................148 CURRICULUM VITA ....................................................................................................152 viii CHAPTER I THE RHETORICAL NEGOTIATION OF MILITARY PERSONNEL IDENTITY In April of 2013, I attended the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship in Atlanta, GA. During a time-out, the announcer drew the crowd’s attention to a group of military service members dressed in dress uniforms who had been invited as guests to the game. The announcer requested that the crowd give a round of applause to recognize the service and sacrifice of these men and women who serve(d)