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Feminist rhetorics need to move us from inclusion to transformation: instead of "including" more and more marginalized groups into the scholarly status quo, or "including" comics into methods of analysis that we already use, we need to transform our practices themselves. Seeing comics research as an expedition into comics doesn't work. The spatial metaphor is failing because it's analogous to a takeover in the colonial sense. I center the both/and experience of being a producer of comics and analyst of them. Drawing from a critical reading of my own comic, I describe "the disobedient how," a way of learning from transgressive models. I argue that instead of "collecting" comics, decolonial feminist methodology asks that we "attend" comics through listening, experiencing, and having a relationship with them and their creators. As Shawn Wilson's work suggests, knowledge lies in relationships. I use this concept to guide an analysis of Lynda Barry's recent comics work as well as her comments during a panel at the Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference. In order for academics to have true knowledge about Barry's work, we must have a right relationship to her and to it, which requires decolonizing our relationship to texts and taking Barry's comics seriously as sources of theory. Next, I argue for scholars to pay closer attention to Alison Bechdel's comics beyond their engagement with her memoir, Fun Home. I describe her participation in queer rhetoric through a close reading of her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For and her public discussion of her composing practices. Finally, I perform a retrospective of the history of my own comic book, Oh Shit, I'm in Grad School, drawing on (and developing documentation for) personal archives. Ph. D.

In The Rhetorical Making of the Asian/Asian American Face: Reading and Writing Asian Eyelids, I examine representations of East Asian blepharoplasty in online video in order to gain a sense of how cultural values change over time. Drawing on scholarship in and around rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian American rhetoric, cultural studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory alongside qualitative data analysis of approximately fifty videos and the numerous viewer comments that accompany them, this study is a rhetorical analysis of the discourse on East Asian blepharoplasty in online video. These videos--ranging from mass media excerpts and news reports, to journals of healing and recovery, to short lectures on surgeon techniques, to audience commentary--offer insight into how social time is negotiated in the cross-cultural public sphere of YouTube. I do my analysis in two steps, first looking at how rhetors rationalize the decision to get blepharoplasty, and second, examining the temporal logics that ground these rationalizations. As result, I've identified five tropes through which people rationalize double eyelid surgery: racialization, emotionologization, pragmatization, the split between nature and technology, and agency. Moreover, I've identified at least five temporal logics that ground these tropes: progress, hybridization, timelessness, efficiency, and desire. Using these two sets of findings I build a framework for the analysis, production and organization of multimodal representations of bodies.