United through an "unfailing bond": A rhetorical history of Klanswomen's organizing in the 1920s
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how discrimination was organized discursively and materially in the women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) movement of the 1920s and its relevance today. To do so, this dissertation brings together archival materials from 24 archives including data such as minutes from WKKK meetings, newsletters, correspondence between Klanswomen, diary entries, and a variety of ideological and educational pamphlet literature. Through rhetorical analyses of these materials, I ask: how was the WKKK constituted through its discourse practices? ^ Importantly, this dissertation is not only interested in tracing the ideological commitments of the WKKK. Rather, it focuses on the organizational practices that through which Klanswomen inscribed violent ideologies implicitly. I argue that Klanswomen leveraged institutional, rhetorical, and symbolic resources and their embodied practices of organizing in a process I have termed organizational interpellation. I define organizational interpellation as the constitutive processes and discourses through which an organization is called into being and animated by its members. Through archival materials, I trace Klanswomen's organizational interpellation that invoked the power of whiteness and privilege, often without engaging in explicitly racial discourses. Three studies targeting different strata of social and political culture examine: (a) the local enactment of Klanswomen's organizing, (b) the WKKK's national educational strategies, and (c) the inter-organizational relationship between the women's and men's Klans. This dissertation contributes topically to the under-studied area of women's racial activism in the United States and theoretically to developing organizational rhetoric methodologies by advancing and developing the concept of organizational interpellation. ^
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Patrice M. Buzzanell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
History, United States|Speech Communication|Sociology, Organization Theory|Language, Rhetoric and Composition
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