Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Sheridan, Mary P.

Committee Member

Johnson, Timothy

Committee Member

Boehm, Beth

Committee Member

Caldwell, Anne

Author's Keywords

Women; gender; social media; TikTok; incarceration; rhetoric

Abstract

This dissertation examines how formerly incarcerated women navigate and resist gendered media portrayals through digital platforms, focusing on the “mad” and “bad” woman tropes that shape public perceptions. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theory—particularly Royster and Kirsch’s methodological practices and Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening—this study combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of mainstream headlines with Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) of TikTok content. CDA of media coverage surrounding Lori Vallow Daybell, Casey Anthony, and Andrea Yates reveals how language, imagery, and cultural logics sustain harmful binaries that portray women who commit crimes either as depraved or as excused by madness, obscuring the complexity of their lives. MDA of the TikTok pages of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Tina Tskonas, and Doreian Barberi demonstrates how formerly incarcerated women employ textual, visual, auditory, and gestural modes to counter dominant narratives, reclaim rhetorical agency, and reconstruct identity in the wake of incarceration. Findings show that platform-specific affordances enable these women to strategically reframe their stories, challenging patriarchal and carceral discourses while sometimes reproducing aspects of them. This work contributes to scholarship in feminist rhetoric, prison literacy, and digital activism by illustrating the power of rhetorical listening in dismantling reductive binaries and highlighting the significance of self-representation in post-incarceration contexts.

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