Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation examines processes of public deliberation over military membership policies and shifts in the regulatory exclusions of queer servicemembers. Specifically, it focuses on rhetorical deployments of the soldier as a rhetorical figure whose symbolic force (re)articulates militarism and gender as it invokes particular ideological discourses, myths, and tropes and investigates how these figurations circulated and animated certain gendered and militarized beliefs, values, norms, etc. with which publics might render judgment. The inclusion of a range of policy debates oriented this investigation toward strategic (re)articulations of the gendered relationships between militarism and the figure of the soldier within and across deliberations over four military membership controversies: Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, women's exclusion from direct ground combat, the gender-based Selective Service registration requirement, and restrictions on transgender military service/members. This dissertation adopts a critical gender approach to analyze rhetorical practices and figures operating in controversies. It positions disagreement involving questions of fit or coherence between policy goals and populations as an iterative process of collective imagining that conditions how figures (of the soldier) appear and/or are (re)presented as they circulate among publics. Based on the analysis, this dissertation concludes that protector/protected logics, in particular, as well as other central nationalistic and patriarchal cultural myths that iv articulate the archetypal status and figure of the soldier, manifested militarized and gendered indices of power that created, expanded, and constrained queer soldiers' access to rhetorics of dis/incorporation as discursive publics attended to and deliberated their collective image(s). Strategic figurations of soldiers thus structured negotiations over and informed bases for judgments regarding the (de)regulation of particular military populations and what counts as legitimate conditions of vulnerability and forms of sacrifice relative to performances of the (queer) soldier-protector