Protest Rhetoric Research Articles

Beyond participation, toward disparticipation

ABSTRACT Social movements require participatory dissent. Facing tensions between ideological purity and mass popularity, movements that desire to be politically effective and act in the interest of their participants need dissent that leads to revision instead of conflict that devolves to dissolution. Using three examples from the 2017 and 2019 Women’s Marches, this essay theorizes “disparticipation.” Building from José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, I define disparticipation as participatory, disidentifying dissent. While disparticipants may be seen as not participating, or even counter-protesting, I reframe their participation as a “diss” of a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Disparticipants dissent from binary oppositions of popular/pure and reformist/radical and disidentify to promote coalition-building. Women’s March disparticipants dissed white feminist racism, cissexism, and antisemitism. Disparticipation generates discourse that can expand the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices.

The Woman in White: Marian Halcombe, or Checkmate on Women’s Empowerment

Wilkie Collins’s fraudulent rhetoric of protest against patriarchal Victorian oppression is manifested through his manipulation of Marian Halcombe’s character: she does not represent an attainable example of women’s empowerment but rather of women’s subordination. Marian confronts Victorian patriarchal discourse through the doomed, symbolic games of chess she plays with Fosco and Collins, but she is inevitably disciplined, tamed, and transformed into the perfect “Angel in the House.” When the novel concludes, neither gender roles will have been changed nor equality attained, and feminine readers will have been lured into accepting that resignation, sacrifice and submission are the only alternatives.

Violence and Nonviolence in the Rhetoric of Social Protest

Abstract The nonviolence so heralded in studies of protest has lost its strategic effectiveness; nonviolence has become, not a strategy in the pursuit of justice, but an end in itself, a telos. In order to better conceptualize violence and nonviolence in the contemporary rhetoric of social protest, this essay provides a review and critique of prominent rhetorical studies of protest violence that have placed violent tactics solely in the service of nonviolence. Rhetorical scholars are in a unique position to reconsider and reframe understandings of violence and nonviolence in social protest that persist both in rhetorical studies and in the popular imagination about how social change can and should happen. Violence and nonviolence have too often been divorced from the white supremacist history and context in which they operate, particularly in the United States—creating meaning structures that make the violent protest tactics deployed by non-dominant groups culturally illegible. This essay works to reframe the violent tactics most commonly deployed in the current moment by arguing that the looting, property destruction, and even the direct physical violence that is most often associated with various Leftist and anti-racist activists can work strategically to challenge the police-State's monopoly on violence. Drawing out the implications of these interconnected points, the essay provides a more nuanced understanding of violent tactics that can both help restore the disruptive function of protest rhetoric and better challenge white supremacy in the service of justice.

Rhetoricity at the End of History: Defining Rhetorical Debility under Neoliberal Colonialism

ABSTRACT This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist rhetorical studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, rhetorical debility frames the ways that hierarchical human and nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. This theory extends the concept of “rhetorical capacities,” located within a genealogy of new materialist and posthuman thought in rhetorical studies, in response to intersectional critique of new materialism from Indigenous scholars and disability studies. The essay demonstrates rhetorical debility’s applicability to transnational sites of oppression along axes of disability, colonialism, and neoliberalism through a case study analysis of Palestinian protest rhetoric.

A Legacy of Cunning Rhetorical Agility: Métis Polymorphism in the Protest Rhetoric of Sojourner Truth and Sarah Grimké

In Greek mythology, Metis’s cunning intelligence and polymorphism are crucial in Zeus’s victory over the Titans. However, the paranoid god eventually swallows Metis and claims her cunning intellect as his own—an act analogous to the patriarchal consumption of women’s voice. The rhetorical concept of métis derived from this myth refers to wily, cunning, and polymorphic intelligence. This article explicates the rhetorical concept of métis and argues that women have employed métis polymorphic rhetoric throughout history to negotiate intersecting oppressions, protest injustice, and engender change. By reexamining the protest rhetoric of early feminist activists Sojourner Truth and Sarah Grimké and connecting their tactics to contemporary scholarship on feminist activism, this article draws attention to métis as a consistent determinant and a valuable theoretic framework already residing under the surface of much feminist rhetorical inquiry.

Organized Mobilization on Social Media: A Multi-Institutional Perspective on Protest Rhetoric, Reach, and Reinforcement

Social media protests aim to mobilize participants and reach new audiences; however, little is understood about online social movements from a multi-institutional perspective. A multi-institutional understanding of online protest activities would recognize multiple sources of power, each of which leverages their (different) social, political, and cultural contexts to mobilize participation. This study proposes a multi-method framework to examine online mobilization by large Facebook groups protesting a law by the Indian government. First, an analysis of major Facebook groups reveals nostalgic, political, religious, and journalistic fields that form different narratives to the social movement. Second, findings based on linguistic topic modeling illustrate the criticism, broadcasting, and debating social media strategies characteristic of each field. Finally, a social network analysis approach identifies the importance of the journalistic field as a potential mediator that seeds information in nostalgic, political, and cultural fields through content coordination networks.

Real men love babies: protest speech and masculinity at abortion clinics in the Southern United States

ABSTRACT This article examines the politicized space outside the abortion clinic as a site where gender ideologies about male roles and responsibilities in abortion are contested, using anti-abortion protest rhetoric that targets men accompanying women. Protesters attempt to elicit reactions from men using gendered stereotypes, in hopes that men will change their minds about or prevent an abortion. Anti-abortion protest speech uses mixed messages about masculinity, strength, and fatherhood to shame male companions for their support of abortion. Protesters’ rhetoric constructs men as inherently responsible for preventing abortion, where only by leaving the clinic space can these men gain power, controlling their reproductive futures by controlling their female companion’s. However, men reacted in different ways to the words shouted by protesters: by ignoring them, agreeing with them, or occasionally by initiating physical or verbal altercations. I find that male companions often employ tropes of patriarchal masculinity within attempts to perform supportive masculinity in response to protest speech, while protesters simultaneously use patriarchal masculinity and contemporary gender ideologies on responsible fatherhood in attempts to prevent abortion. These conflicting rhetorical themes and diverse reactions are indicative of larger struggles in the U.S. pro-choice and pro-life movements about the role of men in abortion.

The Readies (from Bob Brown to dj readies)

I focused in this article on a precise example of a reading machine, a machine that probably never truly existed, but received however quite a lot of feedback, to the point that it became the center piece of a protest rhetoric. Those are Robert Carlton Brown’s Readies (1930). The desire to find new ways of capturing, preserving and transmitting texts has been a recurring feature throughout the 20th century. And the process intensified in the 21st century with the latest computer developments that have multiplied the reading surfaces, the touch pad and e-readers to more and more accurate screens of our computers. These new devices bring us into a culture of the screen that seems to sound the death knell of the book and its culture. However, this search for a technical device capable of competing with the codex was not done at once, it did not lead spontaneously to a functional model. The desire to renew the very instruments of reading has left many traces, projects of reading machines dead on the soap opera. These projects all concern a wish, that of renovating the techniques of conservation and dissemination of texts, as well as the very mechanisms of reading, which never evolves quickly enough. The careful examination of Brown's project, notably in it’s controversial resumption by Craig Saper, under the pseudonym dj readies, will make it possible to understand how reading machines, beyond their technical dimension, have important semiotic and symbolic implications.

Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding AtlanticBlack Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black LiteratureHumane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death

Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding AtlanticBlack Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black LiteratureHumane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death

Writing against innocence: Entangled temporality, black subjectivity, and Drum writers revisited

This article examines the representation of time in narratives of childhood experience in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963). These two autobiographies are among the most widely-known works by the group of South African writers who have been loosely associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Originating from the early years of the anti-apartheid struggle and resonating widely with the heightened anticolonial resistance movements across the continent, writings by the so-called Drum writers, many of whom later went into exile, have often been viewed and criticized as “protest literature”, as literary works whose aesthetic merits are somehow compromised by the overt political purposes they appear to serve. This article seeks to revise such a reading by revisiting the politics of the stylistic innovations in these autobiographical narratives. Themes and motifs directly derived from the rhetoric of political protest, as I argue, in fact problematize a developmental logic governing the biographical transition from childhood to adulthood and contribute to a radical critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. While writing from polemical positions and from inside the historical juncture of political resistance, these writers’ narrative reflections on and re-orderings of the relationship between the past and the present also partake of the process of refashioning modern black subjectivity, a significant move of literary intervention that still has profound resonance in our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present.

Making Sense of the People’s Climate March: Towards an Aesthetic Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Protest

This essay contributes to participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) by offering a Rancièrian aesthetic approach to the rhetoric of social protest at the 2014 People’s Climate March (PCM). Although the PCM has been praised for its democratic commitments to social change, I argue that police reinforced a consensual aesthetic order that acquiesced with the status quo by partitioning sensibilities of space and mobility. Demarcating acceptable spaces for protest and requiring marchers to keep moving at all times enforced a hierarchical aesthetic order that limited possibilities of dissensus. However, there was one ephemeral moment of dissensus when all of the protesters stopped and observed a moment of silence. This rhetorical performance temporarily ruptured dominant intelligibilities of police order and consummated new subjectivities, demonstrating the radical possibilities of dissensus through silence for climate change advocacy.

Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya by Michelle Armstrong-Partida

Reviewed by: Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya by Michelle Armstrong-Partida Richard Ibarra Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2017) xvi + 392 pp. The medieval clergy, especially the local village priests, are often described by scholars and students as ignorant, promiscuous, and corrupt. This view is largely based on two assumptions: the first is a general acceptance of the medieval and Protestant rhetoric about clerical deviancy that can be found throughout the literature, synodal decrees, and sermons of the period, and the second is the acceptance of the rhetoric separating the clergy from the laity, particularly through celibacy. Any divergent action is simply brushed off as deviant, with no interest in trying to understand and more fully explain the "errant behavior." Michelle Armstrong-Partida's Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya tackles these assumptions through a gender-sensitive reading of the sources, providing a very fruitful explanation of the mental world of the average village priest—at the very least in Catalunya, if not elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Central Europe—that explains their behavior as something beyond lack of continence. Looking at these priests as fundamentally enmeshed in their local communities, Armstrong-Partida argues that their proclivity to enter into domestic unions, called clerical concubinage by ecclesiastical authorities, and to use violence and intimidation to solve disputes can be explained as a statement about their masculinity in the terms that the lay society around them would understand. Scholarship on the issue of clerical concubinage has generally only tried to understand the position of these priests with a kind of [End Page 222] sympathy in the transition period surrounding the First and Second Lateran Councils, when it was officially banned in canon law. Moreover, most readings of the sources tend to conflate reports of clerical sexuality with the more passing sexual relations common among the clergy in France, England, and the Low Countries, ignoring their distinction from long-term, marriage-like unions. These long-term relationships were viewed differently by the laity in other parts of Europe, like Catalunya, where their prevalence and general acceptance among the parish community in most cases suggests that celibacy was not universally identified as the defining feature of the clergy, despite the efforts of reformers. It has also been argued in previous scholarship that a crisis in clerical masculinity was exacerbated by the Gregorian Reform, only to be resolved by the promulgation of a separate kind of clerical masculinity focusing on celibacy, eschewing any contact with women, the display of intellectual prowess, or the identification of clergy as spiritual fathers, warriors, or bridegrooms. However, Armstrong-Partida argues that much of this scholarship focused on the redefinition of clerical masculinity among the clerical elite, who often only engaged with others who shared similar views. For the majority of the secular clergy living in a village community from which they often originated, these alternative forms of proving clerical masculinity did not necessarily suffice. It is Armstrong-Partida's attention to this difference and her careful reading of the sources, revealing the underlying issue of masculinity where others saw only incontinency, that are the two greatest strengths of the book. With this new perspective, she combs the visitation records of the dioceses of Gerona, Vic, Urgell, and Barcelona over a sixty-year period showing not only the prevalence of clerical concubinage, especially the marriage-like unions which account for eighty percent of the charges related to clerical sexuality, but also the unexpected acceptance shown by the diocesan authorities and the parish communities in their dealings with clerical families. For example, Armstrong-Partida argues that the naming practices of a priest's female partner in Catalunya, usually referred to as "muller, dona, or fembra," were more neutral than the terms "vilis mulier, bagassa, and puta [used] to indicate a woman's sexual promiscuity in Catalan society," which were generally absent from visitation records concerning clerical families (47). This differed from practice in northern Europe, where clerical families were much less prominent and the attitudes of reformers had enjoyed greater success in changing...

1968: Music as Rhetoric in Social Movements

<p>In 1968 social movements sparked rhetorical discourses which occurred in many nations and on hundreds of colleges and in communities across the United States. These rhetorical discourses ultimately changed the direction of human events. Sometimes these points of ideological protests shared views on specific issues, especially demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but each conflict was also its own local conflict. There is no evidence that any specific group organized the protests, or that speakers motivated demonstrations, or that the rhetoric of one protest caused other protests. Yet, the protests were not just spontaneous fires that happened to occur in the same year. So, how is it that so many protesters shared the desire for change and shared rhetoric, but each protest was sparked by local issues? Answering that question provides insight into how the rhetoric of social movements occurred in 1968. </p><p> Many scholars call for the study of the social movements of the 1960s. Jensen (1996) argues, “The events of the 1960s dramatically increased the interest in studying social movements and forced rhetorical scholars to reconsider their methods for studying public discourse” (p. 28). To Lucas (2006), “Words became weapons in the cultural conflict that divided America” (x). Schippa (2001) wrote, “Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point. For better or for worse, there was a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question, whether one was an antiwar activist who hated LBJ's war in Vietnam or a pro-establishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counted as rhetorical practice was up for grabs”(p. 261).</p> First, this paper will frame the protest movement of 1968. Then, we will search for the common factors that shaped the protests of 1968, focusing on the role of music. This analysis will provide insight into how music became a rhetorical force in a significant social movement of the 20th Century.

A personal text owned by its public— changing readings of Sarah Raal’s Met die Boere in die Veld

What seems to be a typical feature of Boer women’s personal texts which refer to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) is the militant rhetoric of protest against the British aggression. Met die Boere in die Veld (“With the Boers in the Veld”) by Sarah Raal is a perfect example of this trend. Yet, her case is unique, because she actually spent a part of the war in the veld, fighting side by side with her brothers, which definitely was not a traditional place for a woman during a military conflict. Her memoirs were published for the first time in the 1930s, reprinted a number of times, and re-issued in 2000 in two language editions— Afrikaans and English (significantly under a new title, The Lady who Fought). An additional introduction was added to both new editions, which suggests a new role of the heroine and a new meaning of her story. This paper discusses how Raal’s original foreword and the new introduction influence the reader’s response to the text. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of other paratextual elements of the book and the matter of translation. Having taken into account political and gender discourses operating as a context for every reading, the text undergoes re-interpretations. Consequently, the book, once an anti-British Afrikaner nationalist propaganda story, turns into a popular adventure tale about a brave Boer girl, a story about an exceptional woman, a proto-feminist who transgresses the conventional gender roles, or into a universal pacifist protest. In the 2000 edition pacifist and feminist aspects come to the foreground, and this way the old story becomes a suitable read for the modern post-apartheid reader.

Comfort through ‘the lively Word of God’: Katherine Willoughby and the Protestant Funeral Monument

What does the use of biblical scripture, viewed through the funeral monument’s material and spatial presence in the church building disclose about the role of the places for the dead in establishing and maintaining church practices and ritual during the formative years of the Reformation? Taking the lead from the tomb of early evangelical reformer Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk at Spilsby in Lincolnshire, this article examines the relationship between text, space and materiality in the formulation of a protestant rhetoric of congregational equality with its epicentre in the church nave. Tracing the texts and placements of commemorative structures, and their relationship to official as well as more radical protestant texts, including the Elizabethan Injunctions (1559), as well as the writing of John Dod (1615), this preliminary investigation explores the fertile relationship between object and text in the development of Protestant identities.By applying recent archaeological scholarship into the role of ‘presencing’ mechanisms (Graves 2000, & Roffey, 2008) in the medieval and post-medieval church interior to the Willoughby monument in Spilsby’s north chancel, as well as two further examples of the tombs of protestant reformers, the notion of a protestant dismissal of the visual as a tool in devotion will be challenged. By introducing the central role of placement, the approach will destabilize the view that in the protestant church ‘the greatest visual impact came from words’ (MacCulloch, 1999, p. 159), and instead, place language into the wider architectural and spatial narratives of the church interior.

Internatural Activists and the “Blackfish Effect”: Contemplating Captive Orcas’ Protest Rhetoric through a Coherence Frame

The documentary film Blackfish (2013) follows Tilikum, a captive SeaWorld prisoner-orca responsible for the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau and two others. The film has had a profound effect on public perceptions of orca captivity creating the “Blackfish Effect.” Our critical analysis of the film engages Plec’s (2013) internatural communication categories of complicity, implication, and coherence. We argue that the film illustrates the flawed hierarchy within the binary/dualistic system. In deconstructing a dualism, we must recognize the physical power and actions of captive orcas that could be seen as a form of protest rhetoric. The case example of orcas in captivity as a whole illustrates that regarding orcas as unique actors with intelligible behaviors offers a way of understanding how to listen to the more-than-human world. Our article has been one attempt to illustrate how captive orcas can be heard as extrahuman citizens who participate, and even instigate, policy making.

Ada Deer and the Menominee restoration: rethinking Native American protest rhetoric

ABSTRACTUsing the Determination for the Rights and Unity of Menominee leader Ada Deer's opening statements at the congressional hearings on restoration, this essay argues Deer inverts the ideals of liberal democracy from being an argument that compelled termination to one that justifies restoration t by focusing on the right to self-determination and equality. Beginning with termination legislation as it was inspired by liberal democracy and capitalism, I explore the effects of termination and the burgeoning 1960s American Indian Movement. Next, I examine Deer and DRUMS’ advocacy through the lens of counterpublic theory and argue it stood in contrast to the confrontational tactics of AIM as an example of political moderation. Finally, I examine Deer's demands for the sovereignty of Menominee land and culture and argue it inverts liberal democracy and turns it into an argument for restoration. In closing, I reflect on the range of political strategies used by Native Americans and argue for a reevaluation of the cultural ideologies brought to bear the scope and study of Native American protest rhetoric.

Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865James L.Baughman, JenniferRatner‐Rosenhagen, and James P.Danky, Editors. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2015.

Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865 James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky, Editors. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2015.This collection of essays, drawn from a conference in 2012 at the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, spans around a century of print in the United States. The scholarship on the history of print is voluminous, and no one collection could hope to encompass the entire field. This collection carves out a niche for itself by turning to the margins and examining the ways that different types of printed material contributed to and shaped a variety of protest movements, especially those that have been forgotten. While the essays span a broad range of print media, the emphasis is on the press, especially on subversive discourses and forgotten papers. In the Preface, James P. Danky argues that print, originally valued for its speed in the dissemination of dissent, is still valuable, noting that Today, the digital makes a mockery of any notion of speed in other media, whether used for protest or not; but print remains essential for many protests in the United States and globally. In both cases, when ideas are formalized on the page, they possess a power that the purely auditory does (x). James L. Baughman echoes this sentiment in his Introduction in which he rebuts Alexis de Tocqueville's argument that the American press was ineffective and apolitical, filled with nothing but advertisements and anecdotes. For Baughman, the medium of print and the rhetoric of protest are inevitably necessary to each other.The collection is arranged thematically and roughly chronologically into three sections. The first, Revolt and Reaction, broadly addresses the theme of rebellion beginning with Adam Thomas's discussion of Southern reactions to Reconstruction and to carpetbaggers, making clear that protests are not always progressive or radical. In an interesting departure from the rest of the collection's emphasis on words, Andrew Hoyt's essay looks at Carlo Abate's newspaper woodcuts and his attempts to assert his artistic subjectivity against mechanism as part of the political discourse of anarchism. Other essays include Nicolas Kanellos's study of a trove of Spanish language anarchist and protest papers, revealing a political and ethnic community, and Trevor Joy Sangrey's paper making the connection between communism and Black Nationalism through communist pamphlets. …

Sassoon’s Wartime Ethics: Satire, Sarcasm, and the Rhetoric of Poetic Protest

The archetypal English trench poet, Siegfried Sassoon, employed the ironic techniques of satire and sarcasm to address the First World War’s absurdities. Yet, though his intentions are laudable, Sassoon’s methodologies are not ethical. Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics demands that readers be included in the construction of literary meaning; when ironies divide readers and writers, they miss their target. Despite readers’ sympathy for the war poet’s tragic position, poems such as “They,” “The Hero,” and “Blighters” present coercive rather than progressive rhetoric—negating the social good Sassoon intends by mimicking the unilateral bombasts of war.

Signs of protest rhetoric: From Logos to logistics in Luther's Ninety-Five Theses

ABSTRACTOur paper conceptualizes protest rhetoric in order to theorize the underlying relationship between communication and subjectivity. We do this by highlighting how rhetorical protest challenges the sovereignty of voice. Our argument is that Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses is an example of a sign that protests. To make this argument, we use a materialist method from media studies that simultaneously examines the formal capacities of a sign that protests and maps its historical transformation. Our analysis opens with the two prevailing accounts of Luther's theses: disputation and dissemination. We extend both disputation and dissemination by placing them in a “universal history” of protest rhetoric that grounds many accepted critical rhetorical theories in specific systems of representation. Drawing together our findings, we conclude by urging the replacement of logos and logocentrism with the logistics of protest rhetoric in order to link together disputation and dissemination as a mechanism for both change and subjection.