Diffractive Re-membrance: Radium's Rhetoricity in Countertemporal Memories of the Radium Girls

This dissertation enacts countertemporal memories of the Radium Girls through the development and deployment of a rhetorical methodology I name diffractive re-membrance. Drawing from feminist new materialist theory, specifically the work of Karen Barad, this project complicates the notion of discrete boundaries that lend themselves to hierarchical associations of value, challenges linear temporalities, and underscores the inseparability of the rhetorical text and critic. This project understands rhetoric rather expansively, arguing not that radium is inherently agentic or rhetorical but emerges as such through its intra-action with various bodies and systems to varying rhetorical effects. As such, this project contributes to burgeoning scholarship on nonhuman rhetorics captured under the banner of rhetorical new materialisms. By focusing each analytical chapter on a particular medium (in situ tourism, film, and books), this project rejects linear temporality in favor of asking how different media capacitate radium’s rhetoricity and, in turn, shape contemporary audiences’ understanding of the larger memory of the Radium Girls. This thereby enacts a countertemporal remembrance, the context of which I situate in a capitalist system. This enactment of countertemporal memories of the Radium Girls, broadly, thus supports recent calls from the field of rhetorical studies to consider how some violences morph in appearance over time but nevertheless accumulate with enduring consequences. The past is never past, in short. Finally, this project supports the inseparability of the text and critic, wherein they intra-act and, in my case, allow for the emergence of novel ways of remembering the Radium Girls.