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Abstract
This dissertation examines the rhetoric of Sandra Steingraber, a biologist, cancer survivor, mother, and highly acclaimed activist in the contemporary environmental movement. It examines how Steingraber navigates her understandings of science and the environment by articulating and leveraging her differing epistemological and material locations as appeals to ethos. Coupling rhetorical scholarship on ethos with feminist scholarship on standpoint, it takes on a series of Steingrabers works including her trilogy of books and her series of Letters from Chemung County Jail. The first chapter explicates how ethos and feminist standpoint theory can be mutually beneficial, together offering an enriched understanding of a rhetors social (yet embodied) location and internal self-division. The next chapter examines Living Downstream: An Ecologists Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, and argues that strategic juxtaposition allows Steingraber to negotiate her epistemologies as a cancer patient/survivor and biologist. Chapter three takes on Steingrabers two books that focus on her identity as a mother. It argues that synecdoche in Having Faith works to navigate the constraints of maternal appeals and promote maternal thinking as a productive means to effect structural change. In contrast, this chapter suggests that Raising Elijahs master trope is the metonym; here, Steingraber relies on narratives focusing on her own role as a parent. Because she is a privileged, intensive mom, her rhetoric here recuperates troubling logics of motherhood. The final analysis chapter asks after the implications of Steingrabers appropriation of Martin Luther King Jr. in her Letters from Chemung County Jail. By rhetorically inhabiting a positionality vastly different from her own, Steingraber inadvertently constructs a logical and temporal hierarchy between environmental and racial oppression. The conclusion addresses Steingrabers body of rhetoric as a whole, and explicates the dissertations theoretical implications for rhetoric and standpoint.