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Abstract
This dissertation project takes a tour of three different breasted scenarios in order to answer the question, when breasts come to matterboth physically and rhetoricallyhow do they? Based on the assumption that breasts are just as rhetorical as they are biological, my goal in this project is to add to the collective understanding of how certain breasts gain meaning in and through public discourse. In addition, I contribute to the conversation about the possibilities for feminist visions of bodies already existing within mainstream discourse. In order to better understand how breasts come to matter, or are made significant, I examine various breast-based texts, including breast cancer awareness campaigns, mammography rhetorics, and public breastfeeding debates, and ask how these texts encourage certain ideas about women, bodies, and breasts while constraining others. In each case study, I highlight both the troubling aspects of the discourses as well as the productive opportunities the discourse offers feminist politics. In the conclusion, I argue that the three case studies are united by three troubling themesbreasts as biological objects, the erasure of women, and personalizing rhetoricsthat pose an obstacle for a feminist politics from the breast. In order to address these rhetorical problems, I suggest that a feminist rhetoric of the breast might denaturalize breasts, politicize the breasted body, and encourage embodiment and situated knowledge of breasted bodies. In addition to describing these criteria, I also begin to imagine how the texts I analyzed could adopt these principles. I end on a tentative, yet, hopeful note for the future of both feminism and breasts.