| Description |
The practice of identifying and naming oppression within social movement rhetoric (SMR) has been identified by scholars as an integral component of protest discourse. In our polarized polity, however, there seems to be disagreement between communities about what is, and should be named as, oppressive. Multiple, and oftentimes opposing, protest groups in contemporary social controversies label themselves as oppressed, revealing that oppression is rhetorically constructed across a variety of social identities and is highly contingent on its immediate contexts. Despite this, the communicative phenomenon of how protesters and advocates rhetorically construct the oppression that they seek to redress has not been granted sustained examination in rhetorical studies. My first chapter explicates this conundrum facing rhetorical critics and offers a potential framework for examining rhetorical oppression not based on its perceived authenticity but rather its potential consequences. The three subsequent chapters offer contraposing case studies over the same issue: public lands issues in the Western United States. In my first analysis (Chapter 2), I study the group that occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (MNWR) on January 2, 2016 for over 40 days. I conduct a rhetorical criticism over 25 hours of professionally transcribed YouTube footage: the feed of David Fry, aka "defendyourbase," who recorded almost the entirety of the standoff inside MNWR and garnered over 2 million unique views. I contend that the MNWR occupiers rhetorically resituate the American frontier myth in the context of the struggles facing modern rural America. Chapter 3 is a mixed methods chapter examining the aforementioned "defendyourbase" channel during the standoff. Using findings from my rhetorical analysis in Chapter 2, I create a codebook that studies how the occupiers utilized the tropes of the Western frontier and whether they varied based on the time of the standoff, the rhetor, or were in reference to land issues, among other variables. Chapter 4 studies Mary and Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone sisters who engaged in three decades of litigation against the United States for ownership over Crescent Valley in northcentral Nevada. I find that the Danns root their claims to oppression on a definition of native sovereignty that defies Western notions of property, ownership, and recognition. Chapter 5 concludes with implications for SMR research. Through the examination of the occupation at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the Crescent Valley dispute, I contend that oppression is a strategically deployed rhetorical trope that blends discursive and material conditions to discuss a relational state of unequal power relations. Thus, oppression is a form of topoi and a powerful analytic to examine SMR. This dissertation does not proffer a universal definition of oppression, nor appraise the legitimacy of groups making claims to being oppressed. Rather, this project addresses critical academic and political questions as we enter a precarious age in public life by turning scholarly attention to the rhetorical force, and consequentiality, of oppression. |
