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Browsing by Author "Anderson, Karrin, committee member"

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    Beautiful transgressions: subversion and visibility in YouTube's beauty community
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Marshall-McKelvey, Kira, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee member
    YouTube influencers must navigate the platform's capricious algorithm in order to achieve and maintain visibility online. The attention economy necessitates visibility labor for YouTubers to succeed in digital content creation. In particular, YouTubers must consider advertiser guidelines so that their content gets monetized (and subsequently rendered more visible). Content on YouTube that achieves high visibility tends to reinforce hegemonic logics of self-branding and gender. The beauty community, which produces feminized cultural outputs, is a highly commercial space on YouTube that rewards capitalist-affirming logics of gender and women's empowerment. Working in conversation with scholarship that explores the resistive possibilities of "LeftTube" (leftist YouTube), I highlight subversive tactics that women beauty gurus use without sacrificing their visibility online. Threading in discourse of play and fun, I argue that women beauty gurus can subvert postfeminist, neoliberal norms that discipline and confine gender performance. I first identify the normative genre conventions of the contemporary YouTube beauty community. Then I argue that RawBeautyKristi challenges norms of new momism and the "always on" digital entrepreneur by performing negative affect as a symptom of alienation, decentering western and masculine temporal structures, and complicating aesthetic labor in relation to neoliberal motherhood. Next, I argue that Nappyheadedjojoba performs platform-specific-intimacy to activate an ostensibly apolitical audience. Specifically, on YouTube, her incongruous references to makeup relieve tension, she utilizes beauty-specific terminology to familiarize her politics, she engages respectability politics, and she incorporates self-promotion as relational labor. On Patreon, she positions audience support as promoting creative liberty, she employs self-disclosure in relation to her politics, and she engages ratchetry as resistance. These strategies cultivate a sort of political authenticity. Lastly, Jenna Marbles's playful performance of failure to be part of YouTube's beauty community lluminates the inaccessibility of a seemingly open, democratizing space. By positioning herself as a YouTube viewer who unsuccessfully attempts tutorials, framing excess in contrast to the quest for natural beauty, exaggerating her status as an aging 32-33 year old lady, and flouting YouTube's self-branding conventions, Mourey reveals an attention economy in the beauty community that privileges postfeminist norms of age, beauty, and femininity. Ultimately, my dissertation aims to provide those in precarious positions with tactics to challenge dominant structures in ways that are invisible to those in power.
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    "Cut her some slack": examining twenty-first century ecofeminist digital opinion leader #AOC and the #GreenNewDeal
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Clemmons, Zoe Eileen, author; Arthur, Tori Omega, advisor; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Champ, Joseph, committee member
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds a unique and captivating spot in the political arena in 2020. At the forefront of the nonbinding resolution, the Green New Deal (GND), her position on Twitter with over 6.7 million followers has given her the power to influence and interact with her constituents, other politicians, supporters, and critics on Twitter and has given her the opportunity to advocate for and uphold key policy issues related to environmental justice within the Green New Deal. She can also shape policy decisions as the Green New Deal moves forward. Ecofeminism, as both a social and philosophical movement, argues that women must be at the forefront of politics in order to improve the lives of others and the environment. Employing Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to understand digital phenomena, artifacts, and ideology on social networking platforms, this study explores how and why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a twenty-first century opinion-leader generates support for the Green New Deal, and how she uses ecofeminism as a principle that guides her Green New Deal advocacy on Twitter. This thesis offers an overview of the study, its theoretical frames, methodology, findings, and discussion.
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    Rhetorics of disgust and love in the Belgian colonization of the Congo
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Kiser, Karyn Elaine, author; Sloane, Sarah, advisor; Sorensen, Leif, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member
    As colonial and postcolonial studies insist, the Western legacy of colonization has had— and continues to have—a profound impact on the composition of subject positions and the subsequent distribution of power in Western civilization. Connected to the colonizer/colonized binary produced through colonial involvement is the reason/emotion binary; Western concepts of civilization and primitivism are closely related to the reason/emotion binary as reason and emotional restraint have historically been markers of civilization while the Western notion of the primitive includes emotional excess to the point of animality. Given this link between reason, emotion, and colonization, recent emotion studies scholarship that seeks to unpack the reason/emotion binary has much to offer colonial studies. One such emotion theorist is Sara Ahmed, who in The Cultural Politics of Emotion investigates the manner in which emotion produces and sustains social meaning to construct subjectivities. The intersection of this scholarship and colonial studies, then, lies in emotion’s role in composing colonial subjectivities. My aim in this thesis is to explore that intersection, investigating how emotion operates as an organizing principle within the colonizer/colonized binary and, more specifically, in the historical moment of Belgium’s King Leopold II and his campaign for Belgian colonial involvement in Africa. My focus throughout this research rests on rhetorics of disgust and love, two seemingly incompatible emotions. In traditional conceptions, the former involves a strong bodily revulsion and the latter an equally strong affection and desire. However, within Ahmed's framework of relational emotions and sustained affective investments, disgust and love operate similarly to identify objects of emotion and, in so doing, allow for emerging subjects. Close attention to these emotions in colonial texts from Belgium’s Congo Free State offer s new and instructive ways of understanding the intersecting relationships within this discourse. Despite Leopold’s international notoriety in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, through a series of complex historical and political phenomena, the story of the founding of the Congo Free State and its aftermath has been largely erased from the Western historical narrative. In the interests of exploring the largely untold story of the Congo, this thesis is a close textual reading of historical documents from Leopold, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and the lawyer Henry Wellington Waek, which support colonization, as well as documents from Congo Reform Association leader E. D. Morel. My ultimate goal in analyzing these texts is to offer insights into rhetorics of disgust and love beyond the immediate historical situation while at the same time drawing long overdue attention to this colonial circumstance.
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    The complicitous salute: silencing female survivors of sexual violence in the U.S. Military
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) James, Sara, author; Dunn, Thomas R., advisor; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Steele, Catherine, committee member
    Driven by growing concerns about sexual assault in the U.S. military and public questioning of current reporting procedures, this thesis examines why female military assault survivors do not come forward and report the crimes committed against them. More specifically, I argue that sexual assault in the U.S. military goes underreported and ignored due in part to the military’s culture of masculinity, silence, and complicity. To make sense of this military culture and the attendant discourse surrounding sexual assaults, I study two rhetoric texts through a critical rhetoric perspective. My first text consists of meaningful fragments of mediated public address centered on news coverage of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and her proposed legislation to reform military sexual assault: the Military Justice Improvement Act. My second text is a fictional narrative of similar military sexual assault legislation in the Netflix series House of Cards. Through my analysis, I consider my texts using a critique of domination and a critique of freedom to demonstrate how public discourse about sexual assault and its reporting challenges the hegemonic structure. In doing so, I employ an examination of critical rhetoric to expose a text’s possibility for social change.
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    The rhetorical possibilities of representation: how survivor narratives frame sex trafficking
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Reed, Shelly, author; Jacobi, Tobi, advisor; Thompson, Deborah, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member
    Many scholars across disciplines have highlighted and critiqued the existing dominant narratives of sex trafficking circulating in popular representations. These dominant narratives are also referred to as the neoabolitionist framework, which tends to tell a story of clear-cut criminals and victims. Recently, academics have advocated for the human rights framework, which aims to empower victims and examines the problem of human trafficking as part of complex systems rather than a phenomenon among deviant individuals. However, there is a gap in these scholarly conversations when thinking about how these frameworks apply to self-representations of survivors. This thesis looks at ten sex trafficking survivor narratives to examine the ways these narratives align with other representations. First, I use Kenneth Burke’s notion of terministic screens to examine how the author's context and publication platform affect the ways in which these women can represent themselves, in order to complicate ideas about the rhetorical possibilities of self-representation. Next, using Burke's theories on tragic and comic framing, I argue that the neoabolitionist framework tends to frame the issue tragically, while the human rights framework tends to frame the issue comically, and I examine the ways in which the women's narratives subscribe to either framework and/or how they blend them. While the neoabolitionist framework and human rights framework of sex trafficking are set up as binaries in the scholarly literature, my findings reveal that survivors combine these frameworks when telling their own story. This blending of frameworks suggests an alternative perspective, or in Burke’s words, perspective by incongruity. The conclusion of this thesis suggests how the findings from survivors can help inform and reshape the ways in which activists, scholars, government officials, media, and law enforcement represent sex trafficking survivors to more accurately reflect their lived experience.