PhD

dissertationDiscourses about outdoor recreation utilize popular conceptions of authenticity to shape ideas about nature and identity. Authenticity-as deployed by outdoor retail marketers and institutions that cultivate perceptions through landscapes, such as the Park Service-is a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes realness and met expectations. I contend that discourses of the National Park Service and outdoor retailers can function as both artifacts and contexts, subject to analysis yet also creating the milieu in which recreators gauge perform their own authenticity through practices. Practices are mundane, embodied forms of rhetoric that construct social interactions, status, and experiences. My first chapter reviews literature that addresses the intersections of authenticity and rhetoric, consumerism, nature, and identity. It also describes my method and research procedure. In my second chapter, I analyze outdoor retailer catalogues and argue that outdoor retailers position themselves as part of the outdoor recreation subculture that is concerned with environmentalism. Their use of authenticity challenges conventional understandings of resistance and appropriation. I critique another institutional discourse, that of the landscape itself, in my third chapter. Focusing primarily on Zion National Park rhetoric, I explain how maps and trails perpetuate the division between culture (humans, more specifically) and nature. In my fourth chapter, I focus on outdoor recreators themselves to discuss what practices construct authentic outdoor experiences. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about authenticity and rhetoric; delves into theories of materiality, methodology, resistance, and culture; and makes suggestions for Zion National Park based on my findings