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ABSTRACT

Title of Dissertation:

MODELING WISE ANGERS ONLINE:

GENERATION Z ACTIVISTS AND THEIR

DIGITAL RHETORICS OF FEMINIST RAGE

Brittany Noelle Schoedel Starr, Doctor of

Philosophy, 2023

Dissertation directed by:

Professor Jessica Enoch

Department of English

“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of

Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to

investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to

challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in

the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal

subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger

norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga.

While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their

primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all

make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public

discourse.

Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022,

I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the

multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories

of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins),

cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist

rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the

understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically,

and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of

power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of

wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-

oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists

model through their digital rhetorics on social media is part of a genealogy of feminist rage that

envisions and enacts a more inclusive, more livable world.

MODELING WISE ANGERS ONLINE: GENERATION Z AND THEIR DIGITAL

RHETORICS OF FEMINIST RAGE

Brittany Noelle Schoedel Starr

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

2023

Advisory Committee:

Professor Jessica Enoch, Chair

Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum

Assistant Professor Cecilia Shelton

Associate Professor Scott Wible

Associate Professor Michelle Rowley, Dean’s Representative

Brittany Noelle Schoedel Starr

2023

Dedication

For my younger self, for Manya, for young women everywhere, and for collective

liberation and joy.

iii

Acknowledgements

They say it takes a village to raise a child. This is true. Thank you to my family without

whose dependable help caring for Manya this year I most certainly would not have completed

this dissertation. Thank you for Grandma Mondays, Tommy Tuesdays, Gamma/Papi Thursdays,

and Father Fridays. Thank you also to (the Universe and to) Manya for being such a good sleeper

and such an easy-going, happy, healthy baby that I could actually focus on my writing

sometimes and finish this thing. I never imagined you could bring this much joy and love and

wonder into my life. You are amazing, Manya-Moo. I love you so much.

It also takes a village to write a dissertation. Somehow the process is still extremely

isolating, though, especially during a global pandemic. I want to thank the friends, colleagues,

faculty, and mentors who made the process much less isolating than it could have been. My

writing group in particular, fondly named, “In Search of Good Dissertation Conversation,” made

the isolating work of dissertating so much more joyous. Thank you for enriching my project (and

life!) by bringing your different disciplinary expertise and multiple knowledges into our

conversations, for reading my work, for sharing yours, and for being a happy part of this journey:

Nisha Shanmugaraj, Julie Kidder, Renee Scott, Jelly Loblack, Kesha James, Kenna Neitch, and

Matthew Salzano.

The village is not just those who literally helped write the project, but the people and

places who have formed and informed me along the way. You are too many to name, but I want

to name a few. Thank you to Rochelle Freeman, my first good therapist who helped me feel and

understand my anger, my boundaries, and my self (slash selves, @Leaf, @Caroline). Rochelle

Freeman was also the one who helped me realize while working in the wine industry that what I

wanted most in my life was to get to learn and read and write about language and culture and

ideology and art and ideas. It was in her cozy home office that I first imagined myself in

graduate school and grew the courage to take the leap.

Thank you to my wise friends who have live-laugh-loved with me (hah, but seriously)

and taught me so much. You are my life. Thank you to my parents for, well, my life, and my

education, and my loving formation as a human. Thank you for raising me to be independent and

curious and ambitious and hopeful and persistent.

Thank you to the late Dr. Emma Kafalenos whose “Introduction to Comparative

Literature” course at Washington University in St. Louis made me switch from the sciences to

the humanities. It was her compelling (and challenging) introduction to structuralism and

deconstruction that helped me discover and start to articulate my endless fascination with the

relationship between reality, language, thought, and culture. Thank you to the incredible faculty

at Mills College: Kara Wittman, Ruth Saxton, Kirsten Saxton, Cynthia Scheinberg, and Brinda

Mehta, who introduced me to literature and feminist theory when I was ready for it, helped me

take myself seriously as a thinker and a writer, and modeled for me what being both brilliant and

empathetic can look like in and out of the classroom. I would never have gone for the PhD

without your loving mentorship and encouragement.

At the University of Maryland, I have grown and learned so much, mostly because of the

brilliant, dedicated faculty in English, Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Thank you to Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum for reading my writing and for challenging/inviting me

to think in more expansive, more creative, and more nuanced ways always. Your mind inspires

me. Thank you to Dr. Michelle Rowley for teaching me about Black feminism, positionality,

accountability, feminist theory, and women’s and gender studies and for holding us all to a high

standard of ethical intellectual work. I want to be like you in the classroom. Thank you to Dr.

Cecilia Shelton for helping me see new avenues and insights in my work when it was feeling

stale and for always somehow knowing exactly what to say and when to say it, without even

knowing me that well. The University of Maryland is so lucky to have you. Thank you to Dr.

Scott Wible who jumped onto my committee at the last minute despite having one million other

commitments. I’m so grateful to have gotten to think with you, even if it was just a little bit at the

end. And I don’t even know how to thank Dr. Jessica Enoch whose consistent, attentive,

responsive, compassionate, generous, brilliant, thoughtful, insightful, encouraging (I could go

on) support is what got me through this program. You have such an immense capacity to nurture

and transform and lead and teach and inspire, all while producing discipline-defining scholarship

and raising three kids and doing married partnership and being a mentor to so many. It blows my

mind. Thank you for being my advisor, and, I think I can say this, friend.

Last, and dearest: Vinnie. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for understanding

that I needed to do this and for helping me do this in too many ways for me to articulate here.

Thank you for growing alongside me. Thank you for prioritizing the health and wellness of our

relationship, of our family, of our happy life together. I have learned so much from you and I’ve

been able to grow so much in your loving care. It is an honor and a pleasure to be in partnership

with you. I love you.

Table of Contents

Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iii

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1

Project Overview ............................................................................................................ 9

My Methodologies and Contributions .......................................................................... 14

Anger and Emotion: Rhetorical History ................................................................... 14

Defining Anger ......................................................................................................... 17

Formulating Wise Anger and Feminist Rage............................................................ 24

Anger Norms and “Non-Normative Anger” ............................................................. 29

Youth Activism, Generation Z, and Gender ............................................................. 30

Digital Activism ........................................................................................................ 33

Methods, Rationale for Subject Selection, and Chapter Synopses ............................... 37

Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 41

Chapter One: “Bio Warfare”: Greta Thunberg Uses Twitter to Proliferate Wise (Teen) Anger . 44

“This is all wrong”: Thunberg’s Backstory .................................................................. 50

Platform and Genre: The Twitter Bio ........................................................................... 53

Acts of Bio Warfare ...................................................................................................... 55

Pirralha ...................................................................................................................... 55

Seriously Annoying .................................................................................................. 59

Anger Management ................................................................................................... 64

Deeply Disturbed ...................................................................................................... 70

Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 72

Chapter Two: Thandiwe Abdullah Uses Instagram Stories to Model Regular Eloquent Rage ... 74

Gender in This Case Study ........................................................................................... 76

Eloquent Rage ............................................................................................................... 78

Instagram Stories of Eloquent Rage: Temporality and Kairos ..................................... 80

Methods and Ethical Concerns ..................................................................................... 84

Anti-Respectability Politics .......................................................................................... 86

“This Shit is Violence”: Protest Speech Video ............................................................. 88

Middle Finger Motif ..................................................................................................... 92

Stories of Regular Eloquent Rage ................................................................................. 98

Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 109

Chapter Three: Shina Novalinga uses TikTok to Model “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric ..................... 110

vii

Novalinga and Settler Colonial and Indigenous Relations ......................................... 112

One Form of TikTok Activism: Reclaiming Control of the Narrative ....................... 114

Defining “Anger” in “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric .............................................................. 121

Analysis: Novalinga’s “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric on TikTok ......................................... 125

Foodways ................................................................................................................ 126

MMIWG2S ............................................................................................................. 128

The Residential School System and the #LandBack Movement ............................ 130

Tunniit ..................................................................................................................... 133

Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 147

Conclusion: Networked Micro-Counterstories That Help Us Feel Together ............................ 149

Project Summary ......................................................................................................... 151

Gen Z Youth Activism and Social Media ................................................................... 153

Digital Cultural Rhetorics ........................................................................................... 156

Anger Rhetorics and Unsmiling.................................................................................. 157

Gendered Anger Oppression and Feminist Scholarship ............................................. 161

Micro-Counterstories .................................................................................................. 162

Conclusion: Respecting Anger as a Means of Social Healing .................................... 163

Figures Referenced in Text ........................................................................................................ 166

Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 172

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 181

Introduction

It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to

stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the

manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important

source of empowerment.

—Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

Paradigms move like the ocean. Little by little, one wave at a time, the tide comes in.

Yes, the waves ebb. Each one backslides before surging further up the shore. But on they come.

The landscape shifts. A new normal is carved over time.

I caught my first wave on the rising tide of women’s anger during the months leading up

to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election, though I know generations of feminists before me

started roiling the seas to liberate women’s anger long before. Leading up to the election,

horrified and enraged by the fact that a man with multiple allegations of sexual assault who was

caught on tape bragging that he does not seek consent before “grab[bing] [women] by the p*ssy”

was running for president (and gaining a following), I felt compelled to publicly disclose my

own experiences of sexual assault and their lasting effects (“Transcript: Donald Trump's Taped

Comments about Women”). I used Facebook, which was the most popular platform for text-

based content among my social groups at the time. The idea that a man who embodied the toxic

masculinity that had caused me and so many women I know such complex emotional harm could

be elected president was not tolerable. The response to my post was enormous and the

conversations it enabled—with family, close friends, distant acquaintances, and complete

strangers—were challenging but constructive.

I realized through these conversations that many men seemed to have no idea how

rampant sexual assault was, no conscious concept of how much both men and women had

internalized a disregard for women’s consent, and no sense of how deeply damaging it is to grow

up in a culture that consistently reduces your value to sexualized, objectified, or aestheticized

terms. Feminists introduced the term “rape culture” as early as 1970. The term describes a

system of cultural norms that enable gendered sexual violence, in part by victim-blaming,

objectifying women, and teaching women not to assert boundaries or command authority or

expect to be treated with respect (see Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women and the 1975

documentary Rape Culture), but the term hadn’t yet gained purchase in the mainstream public

vernacular, as far as I was aware. I didn’t have the term in my vocabulary, but I was enraged and

terrified and desperate to disabuse anyone I could of the notion that the toxic (rape) culture

Trump represented was neither funny nor foreign, but rather all too troublingly familiar, to me

and to most of the women I knew. Donald Trump’s candidacy created an exigency—nay,

demanded a response from me personally—that I could not refuse. “Maybe men just didn’t

know,” I thought. “I will tell them.” (Ha.)

The important part of this story is also the embarrassing part. Prior to sharing my

experiences, it had taken me two decades and a really good therapist to even identify with the

emotion of anger about them. I had so fully internalized the American White1 feminine script to

be happy and nice and “let it go” that I never let myself feel angry about being mistreated. As

1 I capitalize the “W” in “White” here to emphasize that whiteness is not a neutral, objective, scientific, nor

stable term referencing merely the color of one’s skin, but that whiteness is a cultural construct shaped over time by

patriarchal, sexist, racist, ableist, capitalist values.

Stassa Edwards argues in her Vice article, “The History of Female Anger,” “let it go” is an

individualist imperative that submits to the status quo. There is a version of “letting go” that

helps with healing, but anger has to be allowed to flow there first. I had never tuned into my

anger. I didn’t even really have a concept for how I wanted to be treated. I learned to defer to

men’s desires over my own. I learned that it was better to get sad than angry. I didn’t have

models for how to be an angry woman because angry women were always figured through

stereotypes that emphasize their irrationality and ugliness. Anger was not acceptable for me as a

white girl or woman. Then Donald Trump won. Suddenly every woman I knew was angry and

their anger was righteous and confident and loud and not readily dismissed. Though polls now

estimate that between 45-55% of white women voted for Trump (Chait), at the time, I didn’t

think I knew those women. What I saw, for the first time in my life, was left-leaning white

women’s anger at Trump’s election raging in public and it was a revelation. The tide crept in.

One emotionally exhausting year into Trump’s presidency, the #MeToo movement

roared to life after The New Yorker and The New York Times went public with the explosive

sexual misconduct allegations against powerful Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. It

was October 2017. Tarana Burke had used the phrase “me too” since 2006 to start a movement

rooted in Black feminist principles to liberate women from the constant threat of sexual violence

(Burke), but as is characteristic of the United States of America, it took a White, conventionally

beautiful, famous woman—in this case, Alyssa Milano—to garner the country’s attention.

A year later, in September 2018, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings took place. During the

public confirmation hearings surrounding his nomination to the Supreme Court, a timid and self-

effacing Christine de Blasey Ford gave what appeared to be painful, credible testimony of

alleged sexual assault by this Supreme Court Justice nominee, a position that is meant to quite

literally embody the highest justice in the land. Kavanaugh was angry, emotional, and

confrontational. Blasey Ford was apprehensive, accommodating, and composed. Kavanaugh was

granted a lifetime position as the highest judge in the land. Blasey Ford was deluged with death

threats and forced to move her family from their home. The Kavanaugh hearing had everyone

“just completely captivated,” an NPR headline proclaimed. It felt to me like the Kavanaugh

hearing put the question of whether any progress had actually been made for women’s bodily

autonomy and respect through a megaphone and the answer was a resounding no. Women’s

anger erupted once more.

I consider the moment surrounding the Kavanaugh hearing to be the turning point for

women’s anger in public discourse thanks especially to several books published around the same

time. These books named the as yet largely unspoken problem that women’s anger has been

silenced throughout history to women’s and society’s detriment. Beyond identifying the

problem, they helped give the public and mainstream news sources language to talk about the

sexist disparity between the idolizing of white men’s anger as powerful or even “revolutionary”

(Traister) and the outlawing of women’s anger as irrational. These books also showed the

importance of women’s anger to women’s health, to women’s sense of self, and to women’s

ability to speak out, organize, and act to make change. First came Rebecca Traister’s Good and

Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her:

The Power of Women’s Anger. Two months later Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black

Feminist Discovers Her Superpower was published, which helped the national conversation

attend to how Black women’s and white women’s anger have different histories and different

present experiences. As Cooper demonstrates, stereotypes like the “angry Black woman” and the

“angry Black girl,” for example, have long, violent histories of being used to silence, mock, and

even fatally punish Black women and girls who dare to speak out against injustices big and

small. By contrast, I would argue, angry white women must contend with the stereotype of the

“angry feminist,” an irrational, ugly, unhinged, man-hating specter that is used to scare white

women away from feminism and keep them subservient to the status quo. With Kavanaugh’s

confirmation and the publication of these books, a new conversation emerged about the place of

women’s anger in American culture and the processes and consequences of that anger’s

racialization. What was missing from the conversation was a consideration of these identity

intersections with age, ability, and culture.

When sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg gave her now-famous

“How Dare You?” speech at the UN Climate Summit in August 2019, I was thrilled to see a

young woman unapologetically using anger to indict leaders’ inaction on a public stage. In this

speech, Thunberg assertively confronted global world leaders about the potential consequences

of their refusal to lead and challenged them to do more. She used the refrain “How Dare You?”

to underscore her anger that they could be so careless with her future and with the health of the

entire planet. Popular media coverage seemed to celebrate Thunberg’s expressions of overt anger

in this speech2. I felt a thrill and wondered if the tide was turning on young women’s anger-- on

teen girls’ anger, specifically. Thunberg’s speech then revealed to me in hindsight a constellation

of teen girls who dared to speak out over the past several years.

Malala Yousafzai was the first teen girl activist I had been aware of, long before I started

paying much attention to activists. Yousafzai did not seem particularly angry at the time. But she

was a teen girl and she was brown and that challenged the status quo of what I had learned about

who gets heard in public. She was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 “for their struggle

2 I later came to interpret the headlines differently as I discuss in chapter one.

against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to

education” (“The Nobel Peace Prize 2014”). Then there was Emma Gonzalez who now goes by

X. Gonzalez survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on February 14,

2018 and became a celebrated activist for gun control. I remembered being moved and impressed

by their “We Call B.S.” speech, in which they raged against the NRA-funded politicians who

refused to do anything about the unparalleled epidemic of mass school shootings in this country.

X was using “she/her” pronouns at the time and went by Emma, so they were a model of teen

girl anger for me at that time. I wondered: was the tide perhaps turning on young women’s anger,

as well? I wanted to dwell with this generation of teen girls and their anger to see how they

might be able to defy and reshape oppressive anger norms through their public speech.

I also couldn’t help but notice the emerging commonplace that Gen-Z was going to “save

the world,” which felt unfair given how little agency and authority young people and youth

activists are afforded to do so. Tropes of apathetic and self-centered youth have endured over

time. But in a decade whose mood has formed against the backdrop of existential threats to both

American democracy and the planet and in which young people around the world have surged

into the streets by the millions to protest climate change, racial injustice, and capitalist

exploitation of the earth, the disrespectful, marginalizing tropes about youth make little sense.

Enabled by essentially ubiquitous internet access to self-educate, connect, and mobilize, young

people from Generation Z are working seriously and strategically to transform society. But, as

many have point out, they still need older generations to do their part, rather than sit back and

cheer them on.

Whether Gen Z is going to save “the world,” “the republican party” (Kehler), “morality”

(Brooks), or whether instead they will “burn it all down,” the idea that Gen Z is “fed up”

(Warzel) and will save human civilization from previous generations’ negligence has become a

commonplace in popular discourse, which is frustrating and problematic to me and to the youth

activists I’ve studied. The messaging belies the obstacles youth face when they try to make

serious social change. While “the youth” are represented as symbols of hope they are

simultaneously undermined as rhetors in their own right by stereotypes that paint them naive,

non-credible, illegitimate, and not to be taken seriously. Even when they are taken seriously,

youth activists express frustration at the idea that adults can sit back and let youth activists take

the wheel to try to steer the world on a viable course away from the demise of the planet and/or

human civilization as we know it. This is in part what Thunberg was rebuking in her “How Dare

You?” speech described above. Indeed Thunberg’s opening line reads, “"This is all wrong. I

shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come

to us young people for hope. How dare you!” (NPR Staff). Thandiwe Abdullah, the subject at the

center of my second chapter, also consistently rebukes adults in interviews with adult-facing

media for putting the responsibility to “save the world” on the shoulders of Generation Z

(Abdullah). Their rebukes are grounded in informed critiques of the tropes about youth that

prevent American culture from engaging effectively in social transformation. Abdullah argues

that because as a society we fetishize youth and see youth as the only meaningful time to be

productive or make things happen, adults who do want change are watching “Gen Z’s revolution

from a screen” rather than getting in the streets to “do the work themselves” (Cortes). Thunberg

and Abdullah both reject the idea that adults can sit back and wait for Generation Z to salvage

the world from the wreckage of older generations. Instead, teens like Thunberg and Abdullah

consistently articulate a rhetoric of collectivity and equality that requires everyone to join in the

fight for a world that will be better for everyone more equitably. Abdullah and youth activists

like them often make a lot of sense and are uniquely positioned, I believe, to articulate more

harmonious visions for the future, but their voices need to be heard, even and sometimes

especially when expressed with anger.

I am particularly invested in the anger of teen girls because of how their age and gender

always already marginalize them in public speech. The ridiculing of teen girls’ emotions as

excessive and uncontrollable enables their exclusion from civic participation. Jessica Taft has

shown how misunderstood, maligned, and marginalized teen girls have been throughout history

around the world. Elaine Arnull’s work underscores how Westerners have few models for how

transgressive women and girls are formed because potentially transgressive models are so

quickly figured as criminal. In Eloquent Rage, Brittney Cooper articulates how the stereotype of

the “angry Black girl” provides ammunition for those who don’t want to hear what Black girls

have to say. Monique W. Morris, Priscilla Ocen, and Jasmine Phillips have used the term

“adultification” to describe how Black girls are punished like adults because their intersection of

race, gender, and age is uniquely punished in education and criminal settings in the United

States. Overarchingly, this dissertation resists the trope of the “hormonal” and “irrational” teen

girl, which figures teen girls as self-obsessed, moody, superficial, and inherently untrustworthy.

These stereotypes or tropes about teen girls, like other sexist angry woman tropes,

prevent teen girls from being taken seriously in public speech, particularly in political contexts.

In Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist,

Barbara Tomlinson explains how tropes lend legitimacy and precedence to false and bad ideas.

For example, the trope of the angry feminist as an irrational, ugly, unhinged man-hater implies

truth behind the idea just by existing and circulating as an idea. By existing, Tomlinson contends,

it requires those oppressed by the trope to have to assert their legitimacy, which only lends

further credibility to the trope. The trope, in other words, is a trap. “Feminist scholars and other

women are constantly asked to defend our right to exist, our reasonableness, our emotional

makeup” (9), Tomlinson explains. When women respond to these attacks on their credibility on

the grounds of their sanity, they “are treating the commonplace product of a discourse saturated

with power as though it were equivalent to a thoughtful academic argument” (8), which gives it

power. Similarly, I would add, stereotypes of the “angry Black girl,” “hormonal teen,” the “stoic

Indian,” and people on the Autism spectrum as non-credible rhetors circulate through popular

conversation and lend credibility to these images, which marginalizes the figures they stereotype

in public discourse. The activists in this dissertation refuse the terms of these oppressive tropes

used to silence them. They do not refute or otherwise engage with the stereotypes. Instead, they

use social media to model transgressive and liberatory alternatives.

Project Overview

This dissertation explores how young women activists (two teens and one young woman

in her early 20s) use social media to shift oppressive anger norms. Each chapter analyzes the

digital anger rhetorics of one primary activist: chapter one focuses on then 16-year-old Swedish

climate activist Greta Thunberg who has autism spectrum condition, chapter two focuses on then

16-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Thandiwe Abdullah, and chapter three focuses on then

22-year-old Inuit throat singer, activist, and model Shina Novalinga. The project’s principal

subjects focus their activism around different issues and use a different primary social media

platform to achieve specific aims. Thunberg uses Twitter to challenge conservative opponents,

Abdullah uses Instagram Stories to circulate activist content, and Novalinga uses TikTok to

(re)educate global publics about Indigenous history and present-day issues and celebrate her

culture. As my dissertation shows, however, all three activists invent digital rhetorics that help

dismantle oppressive anger norms for diverse global audiences.

I read these young women’s digital rhetorics through a methodology that draws on

theories of rhetorics of emotion, cultural rhetoric, intersectional feminism, digital activism,

digital media studies, and disability studies. These frameworks allow me to analyze youth

activists’ digital anger rhetorics in ways that attends to how ageism, racism, sexism, ableism, and

other identity-based systems of oppression shape the norms these activists challenge. Cultural

rhetoric attunes me to the cultural specificity of each chapter’s primary subject, as Thunberg is

Swedish, Abdullah is Black American, and Novalinga is Inuit-Quebecois. Rhetoric of emotion

frameworks allow me to see how emotions like anger are neither “universal” nor “natural” in

kind (Dixon), but rather are shaped by cultural, rhetorical, social processes. Media studies

frameworks help me attend to how these activists’ digital media co-construct, constrain, and

afford their messages. Digital activism scholarship helps me consider the significance of social

media in larger processes of social change. Intersectional feminism helps me attend to how

oppressive structures intersect differently across race, class, gender, age, and ability to shape

individuals’ unique experiences of oppression and the rhetorical strategies they can deploy.

Centrally, this project investigates the shifting socialization of emotions by analyzing how young

women activists use media-specific emotional rhetorics to defy oppressive anger norms and

model a positive form of what I call “wise anger,” a term I define below.

The project centers primarily around the anger of teen girls for several reasons.

Compared with that of older women, slandering teen girls’ anger as untrustworthy and ridiculous

dangerously undermines their autonomy, agency, and authority at the very moment when they

are learning their place in the world. In “It Begins at 10: How Gender Expectations Shape Early

Adolescence Around the World,” Blum, Mmari, and Moreau show how hegemonic gender

myths operate similarly around the world to ingrain damaging sexist scripts that girls are

vulnerable sexual objects needing protection and boys are stronger and don’t need protecting.

Puberty initiates changes in girls’ bodies resulting in the perception that “pubertal girls are the

embodiment of sex and sexuality'' to their own detriment (Blum et al.). These scholars also note

that both boys and girls during adolescence perceived “significant sanctions and pressures to

conform to what is seen as gender-appropriate behaviors.” In short, adolescence is the period

when girls get figured as sex objects and experience enormous pressure to conform to sexist

gendered scripts; what these researchers don’t name is that girls’ anger and even milder forms of

protest are usually disallowed by these transcultural sexist gendered scripts leaving little recourse

for girls to challenge oppressive norms. Especially given that adolescence is when girls tend to

lose their confidence and question their place in the world, empowering teen girls to defy

oppressive gender scripts is a crucial site of intervention for feminists and feminist scholars.

With that said, one of my activists (Novalinga) was 22 at the time I was writing about her. Given

the contingency of age categories, which I will discuss later in this introduction, I felt

Novalinga’s age did not put her in a wholly distinct category from the other activists. The

particular form of empowerment this dissertation advocates is respecting teen girls’ and young

women’s anger.

Prohibiting anger uniquely undermines young women’s sense of self and sense of power

because “anger” names the feeling that arises in response to a challenge to one’s boundaries. In

The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, sociology of emotion

researcher Karen McLaren remarks that Western cultures and traditions grossly misunderstand

emotions, especially anger. “Healthy anger,” she writes, “acts as the honorable sentry or

boundary-holder of the psyche, but most information about anger focuses on the unhealthy

expressive states of rage and fury, or the repressive states of resentment, apathy, and depression”

(6). McLaren’s description of anger as intelligent, information-bearing, and crucial to one’s

healthy sense of self reveals the oppressive function of Western culture’s prohibition against

girls’ and women’s anger. Repressing girls’ and women’s anger prevents girls and women from

asserting boundaries, which prevents them from rising up in public against individual and

structural harm. Girls’ anger must be liberated in order for girls to experience themselves as fully

agentic, autonomous, rational, and worthy public rhetors on behalf of issues that may demand

their angry activism. Girls’ and women’s socialization to repress their anger acts as a strong

deterrent to dissent let alone protest and causes physical and emotional harm (Chemaly, Marom,

Traister, Cooper). That socialization must change.

While writing the dissertation, however, I began to grapple in more complex ways with

the intersections of gender, race, and anger norms throughout history and for Generation Z.

While Western culture has historically understood gender in binary terms, Generation Z, building

on past gender theorists and activists, has made significant strides in moving common

understandings of gender beyond a binary framework. One of my primary subjects in particular

challenged me to question how to consider what non-binary persons’ unique experience of sexist

anger norms might be and how to talk about that in this project. When I was studying Abdullah’s

instagram account in 2020, they were using she/her pronouns and identifying as a Black teen girl

(Abdullah). After drafting the chapter, however, Abdullah started using she/they pronouns in

2021 before moving to use exclusively they/them and identifying as non-binary in 2022. I had

captured Abdullah’s anger activism when they were identifying as a girl and using she/her

pronouns, so I feel the case study stands as a record of a particular moment in time, in 2020

during the summer of the George Floyd protests, but going forward, I believe a discussion of

Generation Z and the intersection of gender and oppressive anger norms warrants a less binary

gender framework. Abdullah’s later disclosure that they are non-binary helped me articulate that

in a gender-fluid (non-binary) paradigm, it is those with what I would call gender-non-dominant

identities whose anger I am interested in investigating under the patriarchal oppression of anyone

whose identity is not white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male3. For the purposes of this project,

though, given how far there is still to go to move Western culture into a nonbinary gender

paradigm, I do not want to lose the centering of teen girls’ anger, as it is this age and gender

category whose anger has been specifically figured as untrustworthy at great cost.

Looking at young women activists from different cultural backgrounds and social

differences allows me to explore how anger norms are both culturally-specific and transcultural.

This transcultural analysis also reveals how globalized spaces of public discourse like social

media can serve as sites where dominant norms can be both maintained and contested.

Examining youth activists’ digital rhetoric on different social media platforms allows me to

consider how different platforms’ designs and discursive norms afford different strategies for

shifting oppressive social norms.

3 As a recent historian who documented Abdullah’s digital activism during a period of

time when they were using she/her pronouns and speaking out against the “angry Black girl”

stereotype, I use Abdullah’s current pronouns (they/them) throughout so as not to misgender

them, but I maintain that in the moment when I documented their digital activism, they were

consciously navigating the “angry Black girl” stereotype in they wise anger strategy. I consider

chapter two a useful case study in examining how someone identifying at the time as a young

Black woman navigated racist, sexist, and ageist anger norms to model transgressive alternatives.

My Methodologies and Contributions

In the sections below I discuss the key terms and frameworks I use to formulate my study

and articulate how this dissertation contributes to advancing each of these conversations.

Anger and Emotion: Rhetorical History

I premise my analysis of anger norms on the understanding that emotions have a

biological basis, but both their expression and their interior experience are shaped by ongoing

cultural, social, rhetorical processes. This rhetorical understanding of emotions contradicts the

Cartesian dualist idea that emotion and reason are distinct and mutually exclusive processes

(Robinson, Hatfield, Spelman). This is important because of how Cartesian dualism has been

used to perpetuate the myth that women are emotional and therefore not rational, as compared

with men, who are believed (apocryphally) to be rational and unemotional (Tomlinson, Jaggar,

Koerber, Ahmed, Joel and Vikhanski).

Though they still struggle to gain acceptance in the Western public imaginary, social and

rhetorical theories of emotion date back to Aristotle. In Rhetoric, Aristotle describes how people

learn within their social contexts which emotions it is appropriate to feel and express in which

situations. Aristotle also names that the socialization of emotions is always structured by the

power relations that govern society. The higher a person’s social standing, for example, the more

anger that person feels entitled to because they have more to lose and because they perceive

themselves superior to those who may be challenging them with anger. For Aristotle, emotions

are not private, internal, and innate, but rather humans experience specific emotions because of

how they have been conditioned to interpret and respond to specific situations. The lenses of

interpretation function to uphold social hierarchies. In short, emotions have a basis in the body,

but they are trained socially and have social functions.

Importantly, Aristotle’s social, rhetorical theory of emotion did not separate reason from

emotion, particularly in the case of anger. In “Aristotle’s Functional Theory of the Emotions,”

Angela Chew discusses Aristotle’s concept of “emotion-enforming reason,” which he understood

to be the key driver of human flourishing because it is what enables acting in accordance with

one’s virtues. Humans, Chew summarizes, have “a kind of reason that directs and structures

desires and emotions” (7); we learn how to desire and feel through our faculty for reason.

Because Aristotle believed that “every healthy human being is always or almost always trying to

emote and act with reason and in accordance with virtues, whether he realizes this or not” (Chew

7), humans’ faculty of emotion-enforming reason, or using reason to guide our emotions, is how

we arrive at ethical behavior. As Barbara Tomlinson writes, “Research or reasoning does not

always lead one to consider the current state of affairs as justified; one can come to see it as

unjustified, and therefore blameworthy.” In short, anger can be entirely reasonable when one

reasons that circumstances are unjustified.

During the so-called Age of Enlightenment and at the same time that Descartes was

advocating mind-body dualism, others maintained that while certainly the passions produced an

experience internal to the person, to gain a fuller understanding of how emotions work, one must

look to society. Eighteenth century elocutionist Thomas Sheridan, for example, theorized the

expression of emotion as “regulated by social practices” (Harrington 74). While “some emotions

were understood immediately upon experiencing them,” Harrington describes Sheridan’s view,

“many needed to be educated into a person for them to understand what they were feeling.

Language is what gives meaning to internal feeling and this must be taught. Thus ‘speech

practices’ grounded in culture are what shape how emotions are understood” (74). Sheridan

articulates how it is through language practices that humans learn how to interpret what they feel,

which means they have rhetoricity. Thus, their social transmission can be studied using rhetorical

analysis. Nevertheless, emotions continued to be studied primarily as individual, interior

phenomena universal to all humans for centuries.

In the twentieth century, cognitivist theory finally intervened on the Cartesian holdover

of mind-body duality and the interiority of emotions. As Shari Stenberg describes, cognitivism

introduced the idea that “emotion is inseparable from belief and reason” because there’s always a

“contextual reason” for a given emotion (Stenberg 352). Cognitivism defines emotion as

involving two parts: the perceptual or sensory aspect and the rational or cognitive interpretation

of what is perceived. While cognitivist theory connects the internal experience of emotion to

causal events in the outside world, it still defines emotion as occurring within an individual, but

responding to the rational interpretation of external events. Cognitivist theory, however, did not

consider the influence of culture on experience.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, feminist theorists and scholars, like Alison

Jaggar, Catherine Lutz, Sara Ahmed, and others, contributed to what could be called a social and

rhetorical “turn” in the study of emotion whereby emotions are understood as socially constituted

and contextual, and thus coterminous with systems structured by unequal and inequitable power

dynamics. In her 1989 article, "Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology," Alison

Jaggar draws upon the anthropological work of Catherine Lutz and contemporary studies in

psychology to show how emotions vary across cultures, helping to prove that emotions are

socially constructed rather than merely biologically innate or instinctive. As Jaggar writes, “The

emotions that we experience reflect prevailing forms of social life” (157).

Also in the late 1980s and 1990s, Sara Ahmed was an early proponent of a rhetorical-

affective view of how emotion functions in society. Ahmed’s theory of “affective economies”

holds that affect, or intensities of feeling that precede our culturally determined cognitive

evaluation of those intensities, circulates and gets exchanged and attached to certain objects,

gaining affective value in the process of its circulation (“Affective Economies”). Humans,

through whom the affective economy operates, learn to attach certain feelings to certain objects

and that bonds and binds us through social and discursive cues. Emotions are then directed at

“some others,” producing in-groups and out-groups, which has material, physical effects on

those who become constructed or perceived as belonging to the out-group: physical and psychic

harm, suicide, physical conditions, spatial separation associated with being hated, feared, the

object of disgust. In short, Ahmed argues, the cultural politics of emotion orient us towards

some kinds of people and away from some others, like angry women, through investments in

social norms.

Through these important contributions to the genealogy of Western epistemology,

scholars have revealed the rhetorical, cultural, and affective dimensions of emotion, and of anger

in particular. This dissertation applies these frameworks to investigate how youth activists use

means of cultural production to disrupt the circulation of oppressive anger norms and model

alternatives.

Defining Anger

It is no coincidence, in my view, that it was the glorification of rape culture that brought

women’s anger into the national spotlight. “Rape culture” describes a system of norms, values,

attitudes, beliefs, and accepted behaviors that enable the ongoing epidemic of sexual violence by

men against women, predominantly. Anger is an emotion that typically arises in response to the

violation of one’s boundaries (McLaren, Aristotle, Nussbaum, Gross). Rape culture is the

systematic physical manifestation of a culture that does not respect women’s boundaries. Access

to anger helps girls and women assert, maintain, and protect their boundaries. Further, as

scholars of social change have shown, anger is often the most effective emotion at mobilizing

collective action in situations of perceived injustice (Condit, Castells). In these situations, I see

anger functioning at scale as a way to protect collective boundaries. Western patriarchy has long

maintained a cultural prohibition on women’s anger in order to keep women from mobilizing on

their own and others’ behalf (Jaggar, Lerner, Traister, Chemaly, Cooper).

But what is “anger” and how do I identify it in my case studies? For the purposes of this

project, I work from a definition of anger that is expansive and culturally specific to the activists

I study, but my identification of what counts as “angry” centers on transcultural, multimodal

expressions of dissent expressed through different media. By way of definition, I take part of

Aristotle’s assertion that anger is the emotion that arises in response to a “perceived undeserved

slight” (Christenson) or a “damage wrongfully inflicted” (Nussbaum), but I do not agree with

Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum, or many other Western philosophers that anger necessarily includes

the “hope for payback” (Nussbaum). When the “hope for payback” conceptualized as individual

revenge is part of anger’s definition, it implies that there is necessarily a destructive impulse to

anger. In Aristotle on Anger, Justice and Punishment, however, NA Christenson argues for a

different understanding of Aristotle’s “perceived undeserved slight” as including the perception

of injustice, which is more in line with my notion of wise anger. Thus, Christenson proposes that

"Aristotle’s notion of revenge is best conceived as a measure of rectificatory justice." My

formulation of “wise anger,” building from prior feminist formulations, takes this view of anger:

there is indeed an impulse to act embedded within the anger, but the action that wise anger

activates is thoughtful, coordinated, collectivist action for justice. Put most succinctly, I identify

anger in my rhetors in any of their speech acts that dissent against historical, structural injustice.

I center my identification of anger in this project on the concept of “dissent” because

dissent catalyzes anger; it is the motivating impulse of anger, as I see it. Anger arising from

dissent can be evidenced via various cues expressed through text (Thunberg), multimodal visual

design (Abdullah and Novalinga), and gestural embodied rhetoric (all three activists). While

certain facial expressions and gestures emerged in my research as common expressions of teen

girl anger, like the use of middle fingers (Abdullah), direct eye contact (Abdullah and

Novalinga), and in particular, the refusal to smile (also used by all three activists), which I

discuss below, I treat each social media post as its own rich multimodal and multi-layered text

within a larger rhetorical situation to mine for the presence of anger. The #MeToo movement

revealed that women around the world are conditioned explicitly and implicitly not to dissent,

which is, as I see it, the seed of socialization that blooms into the inability or unwillingness to

experience or express anger. The socialization not to dissent starts early—long before adulthood.

I'm interested in how young women transgress this conditioning in public speech and model

positive anger, as observed in text (Thunberg), in graphic imagery, infographics, and selfies

(Abdullah), and in selfie videos (Novalinga). I’m less interested in delimiting the term’s scope

than in examining how young women model for diverse global audiences transgressive,

constructive anger. Methodologically, this means that I keep an open-mind to how subjects

express anger.

There is however one specific facial gesture that signals anger across all three case

studies: the refusal to smile. I name this facial gesture “unsmiling” to indicate that the lack of

expression is in itself an expression--an expression of dissent. I want to expand momentarily on

the significance of my subjects’ use of unsmiling as an embodied feminist anger rhetoric. I put

the sexist imperative that girls and women smile on the spectrum of tools Western culture uses to

enforce the cultural prohibition against girls’ and women’s anger. Sociologists have coined the

term “smile solicitation” to name the practice documented across misogynistic cultures that when

women don’t smile in public, unfamiliar men, i.e. strangers, feel entitled to tell them to smile.

Few women report “positive” feelings in these situations (Moriarty). Boys and men coerce girls

and women into smiling in public all the time, which they may or may not realize they do as a

flex for patriarchy. The “dominance status hypothesis” posits that women smile in situations of

gendered power imbalance to demonstrate that they accept their place (Lafrance). In other words,

subordinated women smile to protect themselves from the risk that challenging the status quo

invites. I see the cultural imperative for girls and women to smile as intimately related to the

sexist cultural imperative for women to always appear pretty and accommodating. Smiling for

men is one manifestation of the patriarchal gender norm that girls and women exist to please and

take care of others and should prioritize others’ comfort over their own. Moreover, the

requirement for women to smile at all times reflects patriarchy’s unwillingness to listen to

women’s dissent and its intolerance of women’s anger. Even American abolitionist Harriet

Tubman was criticized posthumously for not smiling in the photo that is supposed to appear on

the American $20 bill. “They could make her smile a little can’t they?” one person wrote on

Facebook. “I would be too discouraged to buy anything with this bill” (Bates).

Smile culture has seen many forms of resistance over the past decade, which I believe

helps to create access to the anger spectrum for women (see this dissertation’s conclusion for my

research on this trend). Notably, however, girls and young women have been largely absent from

the conversation. Girls and young women are often absent from discussions of how sexism

affects women in public, though they are not immune to these experiences. In this dissertation, I

discuss how each young woman exploits the unique affordances of different social media

platforms to resist smile culture using unsmiling facial rhetoric (among other digitally afforded

and mediated rhetorics) in similar and different ways.

Not all women, scholars, or even feminists advocate the liberation of women’s anger. I

hope my dissertation can bring more nuance to the discussion of how anger operates, for whom,

and in which situations. Nussbaum, for example, insists that anger necessarily includes the “hope

for payback” and should thus be avoided in pursuit of forgiveness. Nussbaum draws from

Aristotle and “all Western philosophers” to assert that the definition of anger comprises two

parts: (1) anger is a response to a damage wrongfully inflicted and (2) anger includes the “hope

for payback.” In other words, the emotional expression under consideration is something other

than anger if there is no desire for revenge. Anger in this framing is inherently petty, or at least,

spiteful. It is reactionary rather than thoughtful. It is destructive rather than constructive. Anger,

for Nussbaum, is an obstacle to healing because it seeks revenge. For example, Nussbaum

upholds Nelson Mandela’s refusal of anger in favor of “generosity and friendliness” as

epitomizing good, moral leadership that enabled him to transcend past conflict with former

opponents, achieve compromise and build a better future together. For Mandela, Nussbaum

writes, “generosity and friendliness were not justified by past deeds, but they were necessary for

future progress” (“Jefferson Lecture”). I do not disagree that reactionary anger often causes more

harm than good and obstructs compromise and forward progress. I also do not disagree that

generosity and friendliness, despite past harm, are necessary for future progress. I do, however,

disagree with Nussbaum’s urging of readers to dispense with anger without acknowledging the

individual and structural harm caused by denying specifically girls and women access to anger,

which is so intimately connected to boundaries and power. A historical structural analysis that

attends to the ways that girls and women have been denied access to anger, combined with an

understanding of the healing power of anger, suggests that those whose anger has been repressed

and oppressed through unequal power dynamics must first feel and acknowledge their anger

before peace can be made.

That anger has a role to play in situations of asymmetrical power is not a new argument.

One of Mahatma Gandhi’s ten most important life lessons to his grandson was to “use anger for

good” (Gandhi). Indeed Gandhi’s grandson chose to title the book he wrote about Gandhi’s life

lessons: The Gift of Anger: And Other Life Lessons from my Grandfather Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi, the world-changing visionary behind pacifism and the concept of “non-violent

resistance,” did not instruct his followers to “let go of” or silence their anger. He taught them to

feel it, to acknowledge it, and to channel it into nonviolent action. Similarly, I don’t intend for

this dissertation to advocate that all anger expressions are constructive, or that we should all be

angry all the time. I simply maintain that anger has an important role to play in the spectrum of

emotional experience, and that therefore, where it is oppressed, it must be liberated.

Perhaps it is white people who need to hear this message most. White people (of which I

am one) tend to eschew the anger of those less powerful than them while remaining unaware of

their own anger (see Robin DiAngelo, Carol Anderson, Brett Kavanaugh, the “Karen”

stereotype). I know because I’ve been that white person, one who reacts negatively to the

“manner of [anger’s] delivery” rather than its “substance,” as Audre Lorde’s epigraph describes.

Before gaining the education to be able to reflect on my whiteness and how it has conditioned

my automatic responses and assumptions, I too saw women’s anger as a legitimate reason to

think less of the angry woman and her arguments. I often conflated women’s arguments and

identities. And my default was to assume women who spoke angrily must be speaking

emotionally and not rationally. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Reverend Martin Luther

King, Jr. urges white moderates who have argued for a more “tempered” approach to seeking

justice to understand the reasonability of non-violent yet tension-filled direct action. King

asserts, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the

oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” (MLK Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail).

King, like Gandhi, advocated non-violent direct action, but he did not argue that Black people

should not be angry about their oppression. Anger can coincide with peaceful protest. The anger

this dissertation advocates is peaceful anger that is informed about past and present structural

inequity and seeks to redress it. This anger is wise. It is not imbued with the hope for “revenge”

unless reimagining and rebuilding society in more equitable ways can be considered a kind of

revenge.

Speaking to white feminist audiences in her 1981 keynote speech at the National

Women’s Studies Association conference, Lorde implored white women to face their own anger

and learn how to listen to the anger of those differently marginalized than they are. “My fear of

anger taught me nothing,” she says. “Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.” What

many organizers and activists today maintain, often inspired by Lorde and other Black feminists,

is that instead of shutting down and becoming defensive in the face of the rage of others, we

need to listen (Cooper) and move towards the conflict (Marom) with empathy and a shared

desire for justice. As Lorde argued, I too believe white people in particular need to learn how to

tap into their anger as a source of growth and solidarity with other marginalized people. Beyond

white people, though, everyone can benefit from a power-informed analysis of how anger norms

operate insidiously to maintain existing power hierarchies. This project is invested in how to help

readers listen to the anger of diverse others in the interest of social healing. I apply social,

rhetorical, and cultural theories of emotion to analyze how the subjects of my case studies deploy

culturally-specific anger rhetorics to shift anger norms and help young women and gender

diverse youth assert their boundaries in public. I hope to expand readers’ anger vocabulary by

making legible in youth activists’ digital rhetoric what I formulate as “wise anger.”

Formulating Wise Anger and Feminist Rage

If “anger” is a strong feeling of discontent that arises in response to a damage wrongfully

inflicted, then “wise anger” is an anger response that is intelligent, informed, constructive,

justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. Wise anger envisions a better,

more livable, less exclusionary, less hateful world. It wants to transform structural inequity.

Drawing from the classical rhetorical tradition, my concept of wise anger can be

understood as an anger imbued with phronesis. Phronesis is an ancient Latin term that forms the

root of “prudence” and is commonly translated as “good sense.” It is aligned with truth-seeking,

clever strategy, and good discernment, and according to Aristotle, is one of the three qualities,

alongside “virtue” and “good will,” that are necessary to garner an audience’s trust in an orator.

As Jay Dolmage writes, phronesis “is regulated by habits of character with the goal of ‘truth’ and

wisdom” (11). In other words, the “wise” anger of the youth activists in this study is an anger

rooted in common sense, good discernment, cleverness, and a goal to seek and spread truth. I

formulate “wise anger” intentionally in contrast to the controlling trope of the hormonal teen,

which undermines teen girls’ wisdom. The subjects of my dissertation who model this wise

anger are teens and young women, which may surprise audiences who have been enculturated,

like I was, to view this demographic as anything but wise.

I theorize wise anger as one form of what I understand to be a genealogy of “feminist

rage.” Feminists and feminist scholars have long maintained that disallowing women’s anger

differentially by race functions to uphold white hegemonic patriarchy, and that women’s access

to anger is crucial to their ability to exercise agency and authority. This genealogy includes

Jaggar, Lutz, and Ahmed, the 20th century feminist scholars of emotion I mentioned previously.

These feminist scholars helped articulate not only that emotion norms are culturally determined,

but that they thus transmit and maintain a culture’s social hierarchy. Each of these scholars name

and discuss the Western cultural prohibition against women’s anger as one particularly potent

tool patriarchy has used to marginalize women. In Rebecca Traister’s 2018 book Good and Mad:

The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, for example, she shows how women’s anger “has

never been celebrated, rarely ever been noted in mainstream culture; how women are not lauded

for their fury, and too often have had their righteous passions simply erased from the record”

(xxi). This is unfortunate, feminist anger advocates maintain, because women’s anger has helped

make tremendous positive change in the world, from winning women’s right to vote, to fueling

the civil rights movement, to launching and maintaining the ongoing #MeToo movement

(Traister, Cooper). In short, though women’s anger has helped change society for the better, it

also has a long history of being disallowed.

My formulation of “feminist rage” draws especially from Black feminist scholars Lorde,

Cooper, bell hooks, and Myisha Cherry, however, and their writing about the power and value of

racially marginalized women’s rage. Each of these writers articulates how feeling and expressing

anger against injustice helps marginalized people “retain their self-respect, gain insight into their

oppression, and bear witness to that oppression” (Cherry 6). This kind of anger is clarifying and

constructive for both self and society. My framework for “feminist rage” also centers on

Kimberle Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” framework and Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of

intersecting oppressions, which help me attend to the ways that different systems of oppression

interact uniquely to constrain each rhetor’s experience and rhetorical possibilities. Compared

with “anger,” “rage” is a more incendiary term, used to name a rawer, wilder, more aggressive,

perhaps more dangerous because less controlled type of anger. I call the larger framework within

which “wise anger” operates “feminist rage” to convey the depth of feeling that compels

feminists to pursue liberation. I do not want to downplay the volume of this feeling that arises in

response to oppression. By “wise anger,” however, I acknowledge that the young subjects whose

anger strategies I analyze strategically avoid expressing anger in ways that can be misread as

irrational or aggressive. These youth activists use anger in controlled ways that use more overt

expressions of rage sparingly (see chapter two). In so doing, they strategically subvert oppressive

anger norms in ways that won’t immediately alienate their audiences. As Black feminists have

theorized, however, these youth activists’ wise anger calls diverse others into a collective

struggle for a better world for the many, rather than the few. My case studies deploy wise anger

in different contexts to promote progressive ideologies that seek to dismantle oppression and

even spread joy by making life more livable for the oppressed. Where some Black feminists’

theories are attuned to the anger that specifically racism justifies, however, the wise anger I

identify here is a justified, informed, and constructive response from teen girls and young women

across marginalized identity intersections whose public speech is discredited through the

stereotype of the “hormonal” or excessively emotional teen girl and other stereotypes specific to

their unique identity intersections.

I draw from Black feminist intersectionality theory and cultural rhetorics to study each

individual’s intersecting cultural frameworks and social positionalities to analyze the particular

kinds of oppression they navigate in public speech. For example, to analyze Greta Thunberg’s

rhetorical anger, I draw from disability theory (hers and others’) to understand how her rhetoric

as a young woman with Autism Spectrum Condition pushes back not only against Western

patriarchal ageism and sexism, but also against ableism. To analyze Thandiwe Abdullah’s

rhetorical anger, I draw insights from Cooper, Lorde, and others to analyze how Abdullah’s

rhetoric challenges controlling stereotypes about angry Black people and enacts Black feminist

principles. Drawing from Inuit elders and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, I build an Inuk-specific

framework to analyze Shina Novalinga’s anger rhetoric on TikTok.

I want to draw a distinction between “feminist rage” and what Carol Anderson has

termed “white rage” to further elucidate how “feminist rage” seeks liberation for more people,

whereas “white rage” is invested in maintaining asymmetrical power relations. Not all rage is

created equally. “White rage” is a term coined by Anderson to describe a specifically racialized

and power-seeking kind of anger that white people in anti-Black racist white supremacy culture

enact when they confront “black advancement.” Anderson uses the term “black advancement” to

describe “blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands

for full and equal citizenship” (3). White rage seeks to hoard power among the few and uphold

white supremacy. Feminist rage, on the other hand, uses an intersectionality framework to create

liberation at differently oppressive intersections of identity and social power. White rage is also

fundamentally reactionary: it reacts with destructive anger to increasing access for people of

color in American democracy. Feminist rage, of which “wise anger” is one kind, is a thoughtful,

analytical, constructive anger that wants to change the exclusionary structures that perpetuate

white supremacy. It matters whose anger has been historically empowered, heard, and honored

and whose has not. It is the anger of historically marginalized youth across intersections of race,

ability, and culture whose anger this dissertation centers.

By “wise angers” and “feminist rhetorics of rage,” I attempt to make visible various

patterns of digital rhetoric that historically marginalized youth activists use to put dissent into

action systematically. My hope is that readers of this work will be better able to recognize the

wise angers of young women and will be more willing to “to stand still, to listen to its rhythms,

to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger

as an important source of empowerment,” as Lorde’s epigraph instructs (“Uses of Anger”).

Sometimes this anger is unapologetic but woven into a counterbalancing range of other emotions

(Abdullah), sometimes this anger is sarcastic (Thunberg) and sometimes it is delivered with

charm (Novalinga). The common theme through all these angers is that they are wise.

Wise anger and white rage are not the only kinds of anger that have seen a rising tide

over the past decade, however. My project’s investigation of anger online highlights important

distinctions between the unthinking, reactionary kind of anger that social media is often designed

to inflame and the informed, thoughtful, constructive anger I formulate here. Tobias Rose-

Stockwell coined the term “outrage machine” to describe the ways social media’s designs in the

late 2010s and early 2020s sow discord, reward impulsive outrage, and threaten to undermine

democratic society. I formulate “wise anger” in opposition to this kind of uncritical, viral

outrage. Wise anger is informed by thoughtful, historical structural analysis and grounded in

hope for a world in which all people can thrive.

Digital studies scholars, like Siva Vaidhyanathan, Safiya Umoja Noble, Virginia

Eubanks, Cathy O’Neil, Eli Pariser, Shoshana Zuboff, Simone Browne, Sherry Turkle, and

others, have done important work to reveal the pernicious ways digital communication and

information platforms perpetuate historical oppression and inequity. I hope my project grapples

meaningfully with these implications even as it theorizes ways youth activists use the platforms

constructively. Though social media are no panacea, I tend to agree with Kaitlynn Mendes,

Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller who argue in “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of

Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism” that the “‘mainstreaming’ of

feminist activism,” enabled by so-called “hashtag feminism” or feminist action online, “is laying

the foundation for a collective shift towards a more just society” (5).

Anger Norms and “Non-Normative Anger”

Throughout this dissertation, I refer to the oppressive “anger norms” that my subjects

challenge by modeling what I call “non-normative” anger. Given the social and rhetorical nature

of emotions, “norms” names the object of transmission of cultural value and “modeling” is one

way norms get transmitted. In other words, enforcing and perpetuating gendered norms helps

sexist gender dynamics endure; modeling by enacting transgressive norms is one way people can

undermine and change oppressive norms. This dissertation is interested in how youth activists

use digital platforms to shift those oppressive norms, in part by modeling alternatives. In “An

Explication of Social Norms,” Maria Knight Lapinksi and Rajiv N. Rimal define social norms as

“prevailing codes of conduct that either prescribe or proscribe behaviors that members of a group

can enact” (129). “Norms” describe the attitudes and behaviors that are treated as acceptable or

appropriate for a particular person of a particular identity within a particular social group and

vary across identities within social groups. Norms, Lapinski and Rimal explain, emerge through

communication and social interaction among group members. They are thus both social and

rhetorical in nature in that they involve some manner of communication in order to be

transmitted.

This dissertation focuses on how youth use social media to shift norms because the power

of norms to influence individual behavior cannot be overstated. Sociologist Brooke Harrington

writes about how individual and systemic frameworks fail to accurately explain individual

behavior because, even in a country as individualistic as the United States, the primary force

governing human behavior is social. Harrington explains that, “The cost of transgressing the

social norms of one’s reference group ranges from stigmatization to social death, or being

outcast by the group. This is a huge cost and a powerful motivator for group members to

conform.” However, Harrington notes, norms are changeable. Those looked up to as leaders of a

reference group, Harrington writes, can shift stigmas and change norms. In this dissertation, I

have identified activists who can be considered leaders of peer reference groups with shared

commitments to their causes. Their use of social media to shift norms is worthy of study.

Throughout the dissertation, I use the term “non-normative” anger to indicate that the

anger the activists express runs counter to historically socially sanctioned anger norms. By

modeling “non-normative” anger using the unique affordances of social media, these activists, I

argue, are able to offer alternatives. Because of the power of norms to constrain group behavior,

when people use social media to transgress norms, they can shift what kinds of behaviors and in

this case what kinds of emotional expression are available to marginalized members of

transnational publics.

Youth Activism, Generation Z, and Gender

By “youth,” for the purposes of this project, I refer to subjects between the ages of

sixteen to twenty-two. “Youth” is a socially constructed, historically contingent category that

varies across cultural contexts and over time (Best). The public perception of the category of

youth has changed significantly in the United States context over the past several centuries, for

example. In the U.S., childhood became a “sacralized” period associated with innocence, play,

and the right to protection in the 19th century alongside industrialization, but only for white

children (Best). Scholars of Black girlhood, like Monique Morris, Priscilla Ocen, Aimee

Meredith Cox, and Jasmine Phillips, have elucidated the stark contrast in racialized affordances

of innocence to youth. That white youth are presumed innocent and Black youth presumed

criminal are not relics of history either, but persist today, these scholars show. The dominant,

White cultural imaginary in the United States continues to withhold the presumption of

innocence and denies nuanced subjectivity and agency to Black girls, which exacerbates the

damaging consequences for “angry Black girls” who speak out. This dissertation centers BIPOC

(Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color) subjects across races and cultures in two of three

chapters so that I can attend with specificity to the racialized experiences of oppressive ageist,

racist, sexist anger norms.

I also center this dissertation on Generation Z’s (commonly abbreviated as “Gen Z” or

“Zoomers”) use of social media to challenge oppressive anger norms because of this generation’s

unique relationship to both digital communication technologies and social change. The Pew

Research center defines Generation Z as encompassing anyone born after 1997, though they note

that defining where one generation ends and another begins is not an exact science (Dimock).

The primary factors that Pew researchers use to set Generation Z apart from the previous

generation of Millennials are: 1) Gen Z youth have grown up in a post 9/11 world without having

known the world before [the global focus on terrorism], and 2) they are growing up in an

“always-on” technological environment because of social media, the ubiquity of cell phones with

wifi, and on-demand entertainment. “The implications of growing up in an ‘always on’

technological environment are only now coming into focus,” Michael Dimock notes, attesting to

the importance of tracking how the already documented “dramatic shifts in youth behaviors,

attitudes, and lifestyles” evolve as Generation Z ages. My dissertation contributes to the study of

how Gen Z youth use social media to shift peers’ behaviors and attitudes and contribute to social

change by modeling non-normative anger norms.

Though generations are by no means homogenous, some of the salient characteristics of

Gen Z youth as very online, conscientious, collectivist, and gender fluid help contextualize the

significance of the youth activists this dissertation centers on. According to demographers,

Generation Z is the most diverse generation of Americans in American history and they are more

motivated by social issues than by individual status or financial gain, as compared with more

recent generations of Americans. Seemiller and Grace describe Gen Z’s common characteristics

as loyal, thoughtful, compassionate, open-minded, responsible, determined, and “the most

entrepreneurial generation ever to live.” Kahlil Greene, the so-called “Gen Z Historian” on

TikTok, who is himself from Gen Z, describes his generation as “conscientious, hard-working,

somewhat anxious and mindful of the future.” Gen Z has grown up immersed in an overloaded

informational landscape in which they can access an enormous volume of content delivered

through multimodal media that often includes images and video. This has perhaps contributed to

the sense that, as Jeremy Finch writes in Fast Company, “the weight of saving the world and

fixing our past mistakes [falls] on their small shoulders.” Generation Z also understands gender

identity more fluidly than past generations, but according to Seemiller and Grace’s polling, Gen

Z women-identified persons are more likely than Gen Z men to be motivated by making a

difference versus “leaving a legacy, learning something, and competing with others” (16). In

other words, Generation Z as a whole is more collectivist than past individualist generations of

Americans, but Generation Z men less so, which is also part of why I want to center Gen Z

women doing the work to transform culture using collectivist and inclusionary principles.

Ultimately, I want to contrast the concept of “girl power” lauded in the 1990s, which is

widely understood as individualist and assimilationist, with the kind of collectivist girl power

that teen girls and young women are modeling and expressing today, which is by and large about

systemic change. Gen Z youth are wise to the fact that the social, political, economic systems

they’ve inherited are corrupt and they set their aims higher than gaining individual access to the

system.

Digital Activism

Given Generation Z’s “always-on” upbringing with social media and the internet, it is

particularly important to consider how youth use these platforms to engage in the activism that is

so important to them. Mendes, Ringrose and Keller note that teenagers in their study appreciated

Twitter as “an alternative space for political participation” since they are “denied a political

voice in many social context and structures” (10). The teenagers they surveyed reported that

“Twitter provided knowledge and opportunities for learning and dialogue that school could not”

and that they could potentially use social media to “influence their known peers at school” (10).

Contrary to popular belief that social media is a distinct social sphere for people than their real-

world communities, Mendes et al.’s study shows that social media functions for teens as a space

where they can participate in politics and influence peers in their lives offline. The authors also

point out that so much current research focuses on the negative aspects of digital communication,

like trolling, bullying, harassment, and surveillance, that many respondents reported feeling

afraid to go public online, only to then be pleasantly surprised by their experiences. This finding

highlights the importance of including positive effects in scholars’ research and analysis of social

media, in addition to criticism, as I aim to do in this dissertation.

With that said, criticism serves an important function in holding digital platform

designers to ethical standards and helping publics be conscious users and consumers of evolving

communication technologies. Scholars and activists have questioned the significance of digital

activism to achieving real-world change beyond the digital platforms (Christensen). Sometimes

called “slacktivism” or criticized as “performative,” some forms of digital activism do little

more, some argue, than make the person doing it feel better and/or look a certain way to their

peers without effecting real change. These critiques are important for youth to consider as they

engage in digital activism in order to be aware that what they post or present online can only go

so far in achieving meaningful, structural change. Digital activism, some have argued, can never

be a substitute for putting one’s body on the line and showing up for justice in riskier ways that

require more courage and dedication and thus can often have more of an impact. With that said, I

believe every little bit helps when it comes to pushing the needle of dominant ideology towards

liberation. I also believe that given how much time youth spend on social media, the more

activism that happens there, the more likely more people are to encounter content that may

challenge them to think differently, for better and for worse. For these reasons, I believe it is

important for scholars to analyze the multitude of strategies young people bring to their digital

activism and holistically consider the various effects these strategies might have. The case

studies in this dissertation use social media to challenge stereotypes and enact progressive

ideologies for large audiences. Especially given youth activists’ limited options for participating

directly in politics, studying their activity on social media platforms seems to me particularly

important to understanding what they want and how they attempt to achieve it.

Digital studies scholars also argue rightly to be wary of techno-enthusiast or techno-

utopian arguments that paint social media and other digital communicative tools as

fundamentally new, different, or utopian in their democratic potential (Allen, Murthy,

Vaidhyanathan, Noble). The idea that first the internet and now social media gives everyone an

equal voice in the public sphere is an illusion that tends to get reinscribed on all new media over

time, when in fact, power and influence still operate largely the same way on new media as they

did in older forms of media. As Dhiraj Murthy argues, for example, in Twitter: Social

Communication in the Twitter Age, the seductive illusion of Twitter (and other social media

platforms, I would add) is that everyone has a voice. But, Murthy provokes, “who’s listening?”

As Murthy points out, one still needs power (followers) to be heard (have influence). For this

reason, my dissertation focuses on three youth activists who have “significant” followings on

their chosen platforms. I consider a “significant” following for a teenager or young person to be

over 10 thousand followers. At the time of my research, Greta Thunberg had over 5 million

followers on Twitter, Abdullah had over 10 thousand followers on Instagram, and Novalinga had

over 4 million followers on TikTok. I chose youth with significant followings because I want to

be able to argue in good faith that the digital rhetorics I analyze are leaving an impression--or put

more accurately, anywhere from tens of thousands to multiple millions of impressions.

Digital studies and youth activism scholars also rightly caution against techno-utopian

claims that social media offer a fundamentally unprecedented means for youth to participate in

politics. In “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics,” Joseph Kahne, Ellen

Middaugh, and Danielle Allen show how in the 19th century, for example, “teenage girls were

prominent union organizers, sometimes even leading strikes” (21). Teenagers were even hired by

mainstream newspapers to contribute as journalists and publishers, as in the midcentury “factory

girl” publications, “in addition to offering poems and stories, attested to the tough working

conditions in factories and mills” (21-22). Developments in radio technology in the 1930s and

beyond afforded engaged youth a medium to broadcast their knowledge and views and find

sympathetic audiences. Similarly, teen girls in the 1980s and beyond have used zines to produce

and circulate feminist ideology, though less publicly and less immediately. What is unique about

the networked, digital, “social” communication technologies this dissertation examines is the

ways they afford immediate interaction with enormously large and diverse audiences that

comprise youth and world leaders alike.

Digital activist scholars who celebrate the constructive potential of social media to social

change tend to focus either on its efficacy as an organizing tool (Tufekci) or on the potency of

hashtags to disrupt dominant ideologies and circulate alternatives (Jackson and Welles; Wolfe;

Jaffe; O’Neil et al.). I have yet to encounter scholarship that considers the potential social media

affords youth content creators to model transgressive, norm-shifting behavior for peers and adult

audiences.

As scholars across a wide range of disciplines have shown, using social media can have

serious consequences. But social media platforms are undeniably significant modes of social

interaction among today’s publics, representing great if complicated potential for social change.

My research examines how young women digital activists invent and deploy innovative digital

feminist rhetorics of rage for a new world order. Specifically, my dissertation theorizes non-

normative anger modeling as a particularly effective use of the unique affordances of different

social media platforms to shift oppressive anger norms. My emphasis on youth, BIPOC activists,

and social media intervenes in the underrepresentation of these subjects and subject areas in the

study of rhetoric, digital media, and social change.

Methods, Rationale for Subject Selection, and Chapter Synopses

For this project, I spent time immersed in the digital activist spaces and popular media

surrounding causes I was interested in and kept an eye out for young women activists around the

world whose digital rhetoric evinced anger in some way. I was looking for teen girl activists who

were using social media to express anger that transgresses their cultural gender scripts. I also

read popular articles from 2016-2021 praising youth activists across different movements to find

those who had made enough of an impact to be picked up by mainstream media. Admittedly, I

primarily read mainstream media published in the United States because that is my personal

context and an audience for shifting anger norms that I am most personally invested in. I was

curious, however, about transnational youth activists who were being picked up by Western

media.

For each chapter, once I selected a primary subject, I used grounded theory to immerse

myself in their content, to read and reread their posts to note what patterns emerged, and to

determine an appropriate time frame to delimit the case study. Drawing from Julianne S. Oktay

and Ruth Osorio, and informed by my participant-observer research experience in Senegal, I use

grounded theory for its investment in deeply understanding (to the extent possible) the context of

one’s subject matter before drawing conclusions. I then collected each dataset using the

screenshotting technology on my iPhone and uploaded the screenshots to folders in Google

Drive. With each dataset, I used close-reading and multimodal rhetorical analysis to interpret the

meanings of each digital post in the collection. I analyzed each multimodal text—whether Tweet,

Instagram Story, or TikTok video—individually and looked for patterns across the texts. I

identified overt expressions of anger described below but as I spent more time with the texts, I

moved beyond what I automatically recognized as anger cues, like middle fingers, to consider

how the rhetors were using anger rhetorically in more nuanced, culturally-specific ways.

Some patterns of facial rhetoric emerged, like the furrowed brow, the straight face, direct

eye contact, and what I call “unsmiling.” I interpret these facial rhetorics as clues that anger may

be present, but I consider it an invitation to investigate the presence of anger further and not the

final signifier. Beyond any particular features of anger that angry rhetors express in common, a

more trustworthy way to recognize and respectfully interpret anger, I believe, is to dwell in that

rhetors’ context long enough to be able to reasonably assert that there is anger behind their

expression. In other words, I took Lorde’s call to “ to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn

within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance” as method.

Given my own positionality as a now 36-year-old, middle class white woman with

advanced degrees, it is important for me to acknowledge the inescapable power dynamic at play

in my choice of case studies and attempt to interpret their anger. This power dynamic and its

inherent risks is something I have wrestled with greatly and want to acknowledge that the ethics

are not straightforward. While my intention is to counteract racist, ageist, and ableist oppressive

anger norms and celebrate these diverse individuals for what I theorize as their “wise anger,” I

cannot be certain that this work will not have the opposite effect of perpetuating the myth that

women of color are angrier than other women in a culture that punishes angry women. Given our

different experiences of privilege and what different privileges make in/visible, I also cannot be

certain that I am interpreting their speech acts as they would want me to, nor that I can ever fully

understand their experience. The latter issue is true, however, of all interpretive acts, which

underscores the importance of humanities methods and methodologies that help us in the

infinitely complex act of interpretation. It is my deepest desire that this project helps audiences

better appreciate the wisdom and importance of young women’s anger across cultures and

identity intersections and within asymmetrical power relations. For that reason, I welcome and

encourage future scholarship that can help achieve these aims better than I can now.

For chapter one, I had been eager to study Greta Thunberg’s use of anger in her public

rhetoric since encountering her 2019 speech at the UN Climate Summit (NPR Staff), which I

reference at the beginning of this introduction. After seeing the exchange with Donald Trump on

Twitter in which he told her she needed to work on her “anger management” and go watch a

“good old fashioned movie with a friend,” I decided to investigate her response to this and

similar ageist, sexist, and ableist attacks by other conservative world leaders. I gathered

screenshots of Thunberg’s sarcastic exchanges with world leaders on Twitter and noticed a

theme that became the central argument of the chapter. Chapter one theorizes Greta Thunberg’s

use of Twitter to deploy a digital rhetorical strategy I call “bio warfare.” Thunberg uses “bio

warfare,” I argue, to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees

sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical

strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-

character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg

recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their

meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

Chapter two centers on Thandiwe Abdullah’s use of Instagram Stories to model what I

call “regular eloquent rage.” I chose Abdullah for their volume of activity on Instagram during

the Black Lives Matter movement protests over the summer 2020. In addition to their own

documentation of their anger and activism, they were using mainstream media articles to speak

out against the “angry Black girl” stereotype that vilifies Black girls in the United States. I

admired Abdullah’s courage and ferocity in their display of political anger and wanted to spend

time with it. I was hopeful about what Abdullah’s anger might mean for racist, sexist, and ageist

teen girl anger norms. Ultimately, in chapter two, I analyze how Abdullah uses Instagram Stories

to model what I call “regular eloquent rage.” My formulation of “regular eloquent rage”

theorizes how Abdullah uses the digital affordances of Instagram Stories to enact what Brittney

Cooper calls “eloquent rage” in ways that strategically dismantle the “angry Black girl”

stereotype that prevents Black girl activists from being heard in white-dominant publics as

credible, rational rhetors. Abdullah models and thus normalizes, I argue, regular eloquent rage

for tens of thousands of followers at the height of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Chapter three centers on Inuk throat singer and cultural activist Shina Novalinga’s use of

TikTok. I chose Novalinga because of her rapid rise to fame on the platform and quick turn to

use the platform for activism that complements and extends her throat-singing. I wanted to

examine the digital rhetoric of an Indigenous activist using TikTok because of my familiarity

with the hashtag #NativeTikTok as a popular and effective way for Indigenous creators to

circulate self-representation on social media. I was eager to study TikTok because it is the most

popular platform among Generation Z. Chapter three analyzes a selection of Novalinga’s

deployment of what I call “angry Inuk rhetoric” in her activist TikTok videos. My theorization of

“angry Inuk rhetoric” applies Inuit cultural frameworks for emotions and cultural wellbeing

drawn from Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s documentary, Angry Inuk, and from Inuit

Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known To Be True. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is a

book in which Inuit elders from across Nunavut document Inuit epistemology on paper in

English for the first time. Before this book was published, Inuit culture and knowledge had been

transmitted only orally. The term “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit” references Inuit epistemology, or,

as Jaypeetee Arnakuk writes, “IQ is a living technology. It is a means of rationalizing thought

and action, a means of organizing tasks and resources, a means of organizing family and society

into coherent wholes” (as qtd in Tagalik 1). In chapter three, I argue that Novalinga uses a wide

variety of digital strategies that take up various TikTok trends and themes to speak back against

anti-Indigenous racism and oppression.

I am somewhat uneasy that my methods center individual activists at the potential cost of

exceptionalizing them. Jessica Taft has shown how teen activists can come to be the story itself

in narratives that figure them as an “exceptional girl” and distract from the issue the activist

attempts to advocate. My project runs this risk, in part because of my methods to focus each

chapter around a single activist, but also in part because I do believe they are exceptional in their

bravery and brilliance in using social media to defy oppressive structures and do good in the

world. However, I hope the overarching effect of the dissertation will be to persuade readers of

the potential intelligence and wisdom of all youth activists’ anger, rather than to exceptionalize

or glorify any individual activist. The case studies are exemplary of larger patterns of social

media use among youth from Generation Z, though shifting norms is brave work, so naturally

not everyone will do it.

Conclusion

Generation Z has grown up amid multiple intersecting catastrophes: at least one global

recession, rising wealth disparity, non-stop war, the looming existential threat of a climate crisis

that none of the key contributors have seriously attempted to address, a dramatic rise in

xenophobic populism and attendant hate crimes, the persistent plague of anti-Black racism, an

epidemic of school shootings, and as of March, 2020 (while I was writing this dissertation), the

global COVID-19 pandemic. Gen Z has simultaneously grown up with largely unregulated

smartphones in hand, giving them access to the discourse and lives of countless other humans

across vast distances at all times of day and night. They have not sat idly by and watched the

world burn as common youth stereotypes might have predicted. Nor have they reacted

irrationally or excessively emotionally to the overwhelming scale of intersecting structural harm.

Many Gen Z youth, and particularly young women, have taken on these issues head-on and they

have used a profoundly wise paradigm rooted in the intersecting nature of social issues,

including sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist norms about who can be credible in public speech. The

young women (and now non-binary) activists this dissertation studies represent a growing youth

feminist movement to liberate women’s anger from its historically taboo place for girls by racist,

sexist, ageist Western ideological hegemony.

As Chemaly, Cooper, McLaren, Traister, Lorde, and others have explained, the anger of

marginalized persons is deeply connected to their health, their power, and their ability to stand

up for what they believe in. McLaren argues that for self and social actualization, anger must be

allowed to “flow freely,” which does not mean that we should all run wild with rage, but rather

that we must learn to “trust and honorably channel our emotions--to hear them, to feel them, to

attend to them, and to converse with them.” Those whose anger has been blocked must be

encouraged to let that anger flow. This dissertation helps to illuminate how not all angers are

created equally and that the anger of marginalized teen girls and young women in particular

deserve respect. As Lorde, Cooper, and other Black feminists have argued time and again, the

angers created and informed by inequity warrant more listening, respect, and recognition than

they have thus far received. Liberating the wise anger of teen girls and young women, this

dissertation maintains, represents an important site of feminist intervention.

This dissertation contributes to this urgent feminist intervention by reading patterns of

anger expressions, both culturally-specific and transcultural, through theories of racialized anger

norms (Lorde, hooks, Cooper, Judd, Collins) and feminist rhetorical scholars’ frameworks for

understanding gendered youth rhetorics (Applegarth, Hesford, Dingo). I develop a theory of

what I call their “digital rhetorics of feminist rage” to help scholars understand this paradigmatic

shift in the rhetorical possibilities for anger, spearheaded by young women activists from

Generation Z. Ultimately, perhaps, the anger this dissertation advocates is one that demands

accountability from oppressive forces and from those who wield them. In Staci Perryman-

Clark’s Chair’s Address at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication,

she asserted wisely that “healing requires accountability.” This dissertation underscores that the

path to healing runs necessarily through respecting the anger of the marginalized.

Chapter One: “Bio Warfare”: Greta

Thunberg Uses Twitter to Proliferate Wise

(Teen) Anger

“A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

—Donald Trump as qtd. in Greta Thunberg’s Twitter bio, September 24, 2019

“People are underestimating the force of angry kids.”

—Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine, December 2019

In December of 2019, TIME Magazine announced its choice for “Person of the Year,” the

youngest person and only teenager ever to be selected: then sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg

from Sweden. The magazine’s cover shows the barely adolescent-looking teen standing at the

edge of a rock as a wave crashes against it. She wears sneakers, loose-fitting pants, and a zip-up

hoodie with sleeves that are so long they barely show her lightly clenched fists. Despite

occupying a positionality that society often denigrates as trend-obsessed—the teen girl—the

outfit conveys a nonchalant disregard for fleeting trends and constructed norms. Her waist-

length, un-manicured hair blows gently behind her as she looks up and out, presumably over the

Anthropocene’s rapidly rising ocean. A steady, quiet expression on her face communicates

vision, dissatisfaction, and determination. The subtitle under her name reads, “The Power of

Youth.”

TIME Magazine’s selection was made at the end of a busy year for Thunberg. She

repeatedly and vehemently expressed discontent to world leaders in invited talks at global

climate conferences, she inspired millions of climate-concerned youth to strike from school, and

she attracted repeated mockery and criticism for her anger and activism from conservative

leaders around the world. Upon discovering TIME Magazine’s selection, one such conservative

critic, then-president of the United States, Donald Trump, used Twitter to attempt to discipline

what he defined as Thunberg’s anger. Re-tweeting an announcement of her win, Trump wrote:

“So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old

fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” (Figure 2). Thunberg, however, did not let

Trump have the last word, neither on her anger nor its value nor her fitness for public political

work.

Deploying an anger-positive feminist rhetorical tactic that I will define shortly as “bio

warfare,” Thunberg promptly changed her Twitter bio to read: “A teenager working on her anger

management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a

friend” (Figure 3). It is worth noting that despite Thunberg’s reclamation of the “anger

management” trope, the precipitating event for Trump’s comment in this instance was not an

angry speech act. Thunberg had simply won the designation of “Person of the Year” for her

activism. Trump’s sexist and ageist attack conflates her celebrated activism with an “anger

management problem.” In so doing, he attempts to denigrate the value of her activism and

accuses her of transgressing the ageist and sexist emotion norm that outlaws anger for girls and

women (Jaggar). Nevertheless, in her characteristic Twitter move, Thunberg allows the

accusation of anger to stand while draining its intended meaning. She does this by inverting the

accusation’s logic and asserting her own. Copy/pasting Trump’s words into her bio, Thunberg

reclaims and recontextualizes the insults into her own meaning-ecosystem on Twitter. In

Thunberg’s context, it is not Thunberg who is “ridiculously” angry; rather, what is ridiculous is

the idea that anger and activism are wrong when used in the service of justice.

I call Thunberg’s tactic “bio warfare” because it is an attack strategy deployed via tiny

snippets of text published in the Twitter bio that replicate and mutate the original, antagonistic

text of Thunberg’s opponents. As Thunberg reclaims opponents' insulting text in her Twitter bio,

she recontextualizes the opponents’ language into her own meaning-ecosystem on Twitter in a

genre that is ostensibly “biographical” or self-definitional. Recontextualized in her “bio,”

Thunberg inverts the insults into statements about her worldview. Through Thunberg’s frame, to

be outspoken and sometimes angry is to be brave, politically engaged, and ethical. In each of the

demonstrative exchanges with conservative world leaders this essay examines, Thunberg uses

her Twitter bio ironically to wield words meant to denigrate her political anger to her advantage.

“Bio warfare” is meant to suggest a semantic similarity with the concept of “biological

warfare,” which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the use of toxins of biological origin or

microorganisms as weapons of war.” In biological warfare, tiny particulate biological toxins and

micro-organisms spread virally through human bodies via replication and mutation. In

Thunberg’s “bio warfare,” she replicates micro-texts—sometimes as short as a single word—into

her Twitter bio, mutating the original meaning. As the mutated micro-text circulates virally

online, it becomes a powerful weapon in an ideological war against conservatism, which would

prefer teen girls to stay docile and excluded from the politics that shape their lives.

Coincidentally, biological warfare is often thought of as a weapon of underdogs (Shwartz). As a

young-looking, neurodivergent, white, blonde, teen girl from Sweden, Thunberg’s bio represents

an underdog on the global political stage of Twitter in most of these identity categories.

Though Thunberg’s age, gender, and neurodivergence cast her as an underdog figure,

Thunberg’s whiteness and Swedishness lend her credibility in a global political arena dominated

by white supremacy and Western imperialism. Countless popular articles published in 2019 and

2020 prompt global audiences to acknowledge that Thunberg is not the only young woman

fighting for climate change (see Bansal, Chiu, Bastida and others), though she is perhaps the

whitest. Thunberg’s whiteness, seen through an intersectional feminist frame, allows her to be

cast as a hero and as an “innocent” child in ways that girls of color are denied (Ocen, Cooper,

Dingo, Morris). Priyanka Bansal makes the point that when white women become the face of

environmentalism it obscures the ways that BIPOC communities have been forced to think and

act sustainably long before the threat of climate catastrophe because of colonialism-induced

structural poverty. Bansal writes, “BIPOC communities have been practicing ‘eco-friendly’

methods for decades, even centuries. But these communities are not rewarded for their

resourcefulness because it comes from a place of need…white identities champion these methods

superficially or with lesser risk because they operate from a place of colonial power, rather than

need.” Bonsal emphasizes how despite being innovators and leaders of sustainable living

practices, BIPOC are rarely, if ever, figured as such. Thunberg’s ability to rise to fame so quickly

highlights the enduring global hegemony of white supremacy.

Through the term bio warfare’s resonance with biological warfare, I also allude to the

interconnectedness (or networked nature) of our ecosystems, both natural and discursive,

connecting the cause Thunberg champions, climate change, with the manner in which she effects

social change. Small changes can have ripple effects that disrupt entire ecosystems, but small

actions can have ripple effects for good, too. Though each act of bio warfare is small, the impact

in a globally networked environment, as I argue in this chapter, is significant. Thunberg’s

strategy holds the potential to help remake the world on behalf of marginalized, wisely angry

youth activists.

As discussed in the dissertation’s introduction, my conception of “wise anger” begins

with a rejection of the enduring dualistic view that emotion and reason are at odds. While recent

findings in neuroscience and psychology continue to add complexity to our scientific

understanding of the interconnected relationship between reason and emotion, Aristotle’s

Rhetoric has long offered a nuanced concept of how anger functions inseparably from rational,

cognitive thought. In Aristotle’s definition, “Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied

by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards

what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one's friends” (Roberts’ translation). The phrase

“without justification” indicates that one must do some rational and moral analysis of one’s

slight in order to experience the impulse for revenge. In other words, anger and cognitive

reasoning are intertwined. The cognitive reasoning can be mistaken, but the point is that to

experience anger, one must analyze the perceived cause. William Fortenbaugh summarizes this

distinction in Aristotle on Emotion:

By construing thought or belief as the efficient cause of emotion, Aristotle showed that

emotional response is intelligent behavior open to reasoned persuasion. When men are

angered, they are not victims of some totally irrational force. Rather they are responding

in accordance with the thought of unjust insult. Their belief may be erroneous and their

anger unreasonable, but their behavior is intelligent and cognitive in the sense that it is

grounded upon a belief which may be criticized and even altered by argumentation. (17)

Fortenbaugh explains that Aristotle’s analysis of emotion has long indicated the inextricable

relationship between anger and reasoned argumentation. However, the passage also demonstrates

the long centering of men as rhetorical subjects in the study of rhetorical theory. In this essay,

my theorization of rational, productive, wise, rhetorical anger places young, woman, autistic

activist Greta Thunberg centrally in Aristotle’s conception of anger as operating in tandem with

ethics and reason.

Characterizing teenaged Thunberg’s anger as “wise” also troubles the stereotype of the

“hormonal,” “moody,” or “irrational” teenager. Scholars of youth activism have shown how

misunderstood and vilified teen girls have been throughout history around the world through

these demeaning and reductive emotional stereotypes (Taft, Dingo, Sharer, Applegarth). Even

those adults who celebrate and support youth activism often do not see the activists as legitimate

political actors, let alone as equals in the civic arena (Burg). Teen activists are usually granted

agency only on adults’ terms (Taft). In Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across

the Americas, Jessica K. Taft shows how even global development campaigns that claim to

“empower” teen girls around the world, are in fact designed to turn them into viable capitalist

subjects, rather than empower them to make the change they deem important, which often

includes challenging the status quo. This is a point Rebecca Dingo emphasizes in her work on

neoliberal transnational girl empowerment campaigns. Dingo has traced how transnational “girl

empowerment” narratives re/produce “good neoliberal subjects” and reject “bad girl activists”

who challenge racialized gender norms via their “bad” behavior.

Because young people are not seen as serious political actors on their own terms, young

women activists must first establish their credibility as rational, reasonable, respectable,

extremely informed individuals who deserve to be heard in a political context. To be seen by

adults in these ways requires that teen girls conform to gendered and racialized norms of

expression, like presenting a smiling expression of compliance, for example, rather than a

confrontational expression of anger. Teens’ “emotional” argumentation is automatically viewed

as untrustworthy because it is understood to be the result of “out-of-control” adolescent

hormonal changes. In From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History, Amy Koerber details

how a surprising amount of modern scientific literature on hormones extends ancient patriarchal

commonplace imaginings about how women, unlike men, are driven mysteriously by emotions.

This rhetorical framing in modern science, Koerber argues, enables the sexist stereotype that

girls’ and women’s views and minds are not trustworthy.

Wise anger counters the ageist and sexist view that teen girls’ anger cannot be rational,

informed, or sourced from a trustworthy place of knowing. As I demonstrate in this chapter,

Thunberg’s is a deeply informed, non-reactive, discerning, truth-seeking, political anger that

recognizes its own importance as a caring response to injustice. The paradigm that Thunberg’s

Twitter strategy thus constructs, I argue, is one in which teen girls can be rationally angry, wise,

and informed civic participants. Thunberg uses bio warfare on Twitter to promote this

countercultural ideology, asserting that girls’ wise anger can be a legitimate form of emotional-

rational intelligence and an appropriate mode for politics.

“Wise” anger is also meant to counteract the controlling stereotypes of neurodivergent

people as mentally and/or socially inferior, or, in the case of Autism Spectrum Condition,

lacking the kind of commonsense that might inform wisdom. In the section that follows, I offer

some context to Thunberg as a teen climate activist with Autism Spectrum Condition to further

elucidate the “wise anger” framework for this chapter.

“This is all wrong”: Thunberg’s Backstory

As Thunberg tells it, the story of her engagement with climate activism started with

information that caused her emotional distress. This emotional distress is what motivated her to

learn more, commit to getting to the truth, and ultimately take action. Through this Aristotelian

framing of emotion’s connection to moral reasoning, Thunberg argues for the importance of not

divorcing emotion from civic engagement, but rather for letting one’s feelings, especially one’s

anger, push them to seek truth, no matter how uncomfortable the truth is.

As Thunberg’s mother narrates in the family memoir, when Thunberg was ten, a teacher

played a video in class about the effects of global warming that included images of “an island of

plastic, larger than Mexico...floating around in the South Pacific” (36). Then the class was

dismissed for lunch. When everyone else was evidently able to carry on with life as usual,

Thunberg was horrified. She couldn’t get the images out of her head. She stopped being able to

eat and speak and was eventually diagnosed with depression, an eating disorder, selective

mutism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and autism.

While Thunberg’s critics repeatedly point to these conditions as proof that she is not a

credible source, Thunberg and her family re-frame these illnesses as symptoms of a broken

world rather than causes of a broken brain. Her mother, Malena Ernman, writes that what

happened “can’t be explained simply by a medical acronym, a diagnosis or dismissed as

‘otherness.’ In the end [Greta] simply couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of modern life.

Things simply just didn’t add up” (36). This idea, that depression and anxiety are better

understood as emotional-neurological responses to unhealthy external circumstances, rather than

a simple matter of brain chemistry imbalance, is gaining popularity in and around the field of

psychology (see Hari). Like the experts pushing for a more holistic, sociological view of

psychology, Thunberg’s family memoir urges their audiences to understand Thunberg’s distress

at climate change not as one person’s isolated incident of mental illness, but rather as a canary in

the coalmine of unsustainable structural living practices.

Critics often lump Thunberg’s autism in with her other mental “illnesses,” which they use

to try to undermine Thunberg’s authority. But autism is no longer classified as a mental illness.

Rather, Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) is currently understood as a neurodevelopmental

condition that presents differently in different people but has a few common indicators, such as

difficulties with “‘social communication’; ‘social interaction’; and ‘social imagination’,” and

“includes restricted or repetitive interests” (“Autism Spectrum Condition”). Neurodiversity

advocates argue that ASC should be understood within the framework that “brain differences are

normal, rather than deficits” (Morin) and contribute positively to our overall diversity as a

species.

When describing her own experience with ASC, Thunberg is quick to articulate her

neurodivergence in terms of strengths, going so far as to describe it as a “superpower” that

allows her to disregard others’ opinions of her and “laser focus” on what matters

(@gretathunberg “When haters”). In an opening voiceover to the 2020 documentary, I am Greta,

Thunberg says, “Sometimes it feels like we who have Asperger’s or autism are the only ones

who see through the noise” (04:35). By repeatedly, explicitly framing her neurodivergence as a

strength rather than a limitation, Thunberg helps undo what Steve Silberman describes as the

harmful “adversity” framing that dominant culture has always used to talk about

neurodivergence. She also helps make space for others with ASC to be better understood and

taken seriously in public, particularly girls, who are disproportionately underdiagnosed.

In the family memoir and throughout her public speech, Thunberg connects her autism to

her determination to do something about the climate crisis. In her story, information affects her

emotionally and this engenders ethical action. Her emotionally-fueled politics are rooted in

reasoning and truth-seeking. This is wise anger embodied by teenage Greta Thunberg from day

one of her story as an activist. Day one, for Thunberg, was August 20, 2018, when with a simple

hand-painted sign that read, “Skolstrejk for klimatet” (“School strike for climate”), she sat on the

ground in front of Sweden’s parliament building. After Thunberg’s peers initially declined to

join her in the strike, Thunberg took to social media, cross-posting an image of herself with what

has become the iconic hand-painted sign to both Instagram and Twitter. Her post was amplified

by a few high-profile supporters and by October 20 of the same year, Thunberg had addressed a

10,000-person climate change prevention gathering in Finland (Tait) and sparked a global

movement, #FridaysforFuture, which has now attracted the participation of over 14 million youth

activists around the world. As of this writing, Thunberg has delivered hundreds of wisely angry

speeches to large audiences of world leaders and youth protesters alike, sometimes explicitly and

forcefully criticizing world leaders’ inaction with refrains like, “How dare you?” She has also

won numerous prestigious awards for her leadership in the climate justice movement, including

two consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, all before turning eighteen years

old. She currently has five million followers on Twitter. This extraordinary global fame

intensifies the impact of her bio warfare strategy.

Platform and Genre: The Twitter Bio

Though Thunberg has a presence across a variety of social media platforms, bio warfare

is a Twitter-specific digital, rhetorical tactic, which means that Thunberg takes advantage of the

particular affordances of the Twitter platform and the 160-character Twitter bio genre to achieve

specific aims.

The Twitter bio, being an ostensibly “biographical” genre, serves as a genre in which

Twitter users define themselves and establish their identity for their audiences on Twitter. By

subverting this expected sincere use of the genre with irony, Thunberg further demonstrates her

digital, rhetorical savvy. This, I argue, is a cunning deployment of what L. Ayu Saraswati might

call “feminist sarcasm” (98). Ayu Saraswati writes that sarcasm works by “quot[ing] or

otherwise repeat[ing] other people’s words…and, by repetition, draws attention to their peculiar

inappropriateness.” As the opening example of her copy/pasting Donald Trump’s language about

“anger management” has shown, this is precisely what Thunberg does: repeats world leaders’

disparaging language to reveal their “peculiar inappropriateness.” This kind of sarcasm,

Saraswati writes, can be considered a “productive strategy in feminist activism as it subverts the

power hierarchy and dominant structure” (99). Since Twitter is a discursive context where

sarcasm and irony are prevalent and even normative, Thunberg can trust her audiences to

appropriately interpret her irony. While Thunberg’s pattern indeed subverts the dominant power

hierarchy, I argue that it goes further still to assert an opposite (feminist) paradigm, reframing the

meaning of girls’ anger in public discourse.

Twitter is also a globally networked space where adult leaders around the world

communicate to both local and global audiences. These communications are often picked up

from Twitter by the press and circulated well beyond Twitter as well. Comparing

Thunberg’s use of Instagram with her use of Twitter, it is apparent that Thunberg uses Twitter

specifically to communicate with adult publics and adult leaders around the world, knowing that

these communications will have the potential to spread virally. The encounters I examine in this

chapter do not occur on Instagram for good reason. Whereas Instagram is associated with a

younger and more female demographic, as discussed in the next chapter, Twitter tends to be the

platform of choice for those who are politically active online or want to engage in political

discourse online. It is also a place where humor, irony, and sarcasm thrive. Political commentary

on Twitter is often delivered as snark. Because Thunberg is well-known globally for her climate

knowledge and dedicated activism, Thunberg knows that her adult audiences will see her posts

and bio changes and quickly understand that she is using leaders’ disparaging language

differently than intended. Given the press’ affinity for drama or what they call a “story,”

Thunberg’s strategy to create drama by feuding with world leaders is cleverly designed to

increase the circulation of her rhetoric beyond Twitter. In Twitter (2013), for example, Dhiraj

Murthy shows how during the Arab Spring in Egypt, what made the activity on Twitter so

impactful was not the activity on Twitter itself, but moreso that the global news media spread the

Twitter activity off of Twitter and around the world. The same is true for Thunberg’s acts of bio

warfare, which receive significant coverage off of Twitter, thereby increasing the reach of each

seemingly small Twitter act.

Acts of Bio Warfare

In the subsections that follow, arranged from most defensive to most offensive, I analyze

three specific instances where Thunberg uses the bio warfare strategy to speak back to

conservative ideology and assert her alternative: one that sees girls’ anger as a reasonable

response to unreasonable and harmful circumstances.

Pirralha

During a press conference in December 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called

Thunberg a “pirralha,” or “little brat” in Portuguese. Bolsonaro’s comment came in response to

Thunberg’s recent tweets defending Indigenous Amazonians’ right to protest illegal deforestation

without being murdered. In these tweets, Thunberg “added her voice,” wrote one correspondent,

“to growing international condemnation of a surge of anti-indigenous violence in the Amazon”

(Phillips). Thunberg had retweeted a video of an Indigenous forest guardian getting shot by a

passing car and called it “shameful that the world remains silent on this” (@gretathunberg

“Indigenous people”). Bolsonaro chose to break his silence by insulting Thunberg, addressing

her diminutively by first name. “Greta’s been saying Indians have died because they were

defending the Amazon,” he tells reporters outside the presidential palace in Brasília. “It’s

amazing how much space the press gives this kind of pirralha” (Phillips). Thunberg promptly

changed her Twitter bio to read simply, “pirralha,” which translates from Portuguese to English

most closely to “brat” (Figure 4).

The power of Thunberg’s tactical response lies in its simplicity. Moments after

Bolsonaro’s public insult, Thunberg changed her Twitter bio to read merely, “pirralha.” By

displaying “pirralha” or “brat” as the sole identifying information in her bio, she effectively

proclaims to global audiences that being a “brat” perfectly and entirely encapsulates who she is.

Using the term “brat,” Bolsanaro intends to belittle Thunberg on the grounds of her youth and

because of stereotypes about ignorant and apathetic youth, make her speech seem unworthy, not

credible, and out-of-place in the global arena of political discourse online. “Brat” also implies a

kind of anger, a defiance, and an unruliness that adults interpret as inherently irrational and

immature if expressed by a child. What Bolsonaro meant as an insult in “brat,” however,

Thunberg reclaims. By recontextualizing “brat” as self-definitional in her Twitter bio, Thunberg

asserts that “brattiness” is warranted in an informed, engaged youth activist like herself. She

redefines “brat” as a descriptor of her tenacity, fearlessness, and commitment to obstructing the

status quo in the interest of advancing justice. In this signature act of bio warfare, Thunberg

copy/pastes Bolsonaro’s insulting word into her Twitter bio, inverting its meaning and

weaponizing it against Bolsonaro’s conservatism.

“Pirralha” is not merely a term used to denigrate Thunberg for her youth. “‘Pirralha’ is a

patronising and disrespectful way to address a young female person,” Brazilian educator and

Portuguese translator Jose Geraldo Gouvea writes. He unpacks the more deeply sexist and ageist

connotations of the term on Quora, an open forum online where users can post questions and

answers:

This word is emotionally detached and quite aggressive. You don’t call a girl like this

unless you really mean to be mean to her. The dictionary will probably tell you that it

means “brat”, but is more than that.

Pirralho sounds demeaning. It emphasizes small size and immaturity, but also malice and

unruliness. This is a word you most often use to refer to other people’s spoiled kids, not

your own…

…

So, when the president used this specific word, “pirralha”, he tried to downplay all that

Greta Thunberg is and tries to be[,] reducing that all to the fact that she is young and

should have been disciplined.

As Gouvea’s analysis shows, to call Thunberg a “pirralha” is to call her a “bad girl,” in that it

implies she is a child, that she is “small,” “immature,” bad, and badly behaved-- one who is

unruly, or put differently: unreasonably angry. Bolsonaro implies that as a young girl, she has no

right to public speech and no right to anger; therefore her parents should take her home and

punish her. The term “pirralha” is also gendered female. He is specifically calling her an

unreasonably angry girl who has no authority in public discourse. His insult shores up long-

standing sexist and ageist beliefs that young people should not concern themselves with politics,

especially young girls.

In Thunberg’s hermeneutic inversion, she asserts pride and ownership of stepping “out of

place”—because she rejects it as her place—and expresses that she fully intends to be unruly,

angry, and disruptive, in short, to dissent in an unjust situation that requires dissenting.

Thunberg’s act of bio warfare implies that President Bolsonaro’s interpretation of girls who

speak out in dissent, which aligns with the dominant view of girls who step out of their culturally

assigned role to be pretty, quiet, and agreeable, is the wrong one. Bolsonaro uses the sexist and

ageist term “pirralha” specifically to undermine Thunberg’s credibility and authority as a

political figure and activist. Recontextualized in her Twitter bio, however, the term pirralha

comes to stand in for the importance of young women’s unruly dissent--a kind of wise anger, as I

see it--deployed in the service of justice. Where Bolsonaro implies Thunberg’s anger on behalf

of the Indigenous Amazonians is unjustified, Thunberg asserts that her anger is justified and she

is proud of it. Because “brat” is one of the most common derogatory terms used to belittle defiant

young people, in a single word replicated, mutated, and re-circulated from her Twitter bio,

Thunberg redefines “brat” on a global stage to signify the persistence of today’s youth in the

fight for justice.

Circulating widely across Twitter and beyond, Thunberg’s act of bio warfare increases

the visibility of wise (teen) anger around the world. Though an in-depth analysis of how

Thunberg’s strategy circulates beyond her Twitter bio is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will

note that an advanced search of Twitter for the term “pirralha” between just December 10 and

December 11, 2019 returns a seemingly infinite scroll of tweets that take up Thunberg’s response

to Bolsonaro, in both praise and condemnation. I’ve included one example of each (Figures 5

and 6) for readers’ consideration as a quick demonstration of how Thunberg’s acts of bio warfare

circulate within Twitter well beyond the reach of her bio.

It is also important to note that Thunberg’s bio change on Twitter reverberates well

beyond Twitter as well. Reporters across major national and international news outlets covered

the exchange, describing Thunberg’s move as “hit[ting] back,” (Woodward), “clap[ping] back”

(Hirsch), and “troll[ing]” Bolsonaro with a “snappy response” (Trends Desk). These descriptions

have the power to reinscribe or reshape the very anger norms Thunberg challenges. By

celebrating Thunberg’s behavior as courageous and sharp, popular press outlets help legitimize

Thunberg’s defiance and show that anger norms are shifting, at least for some girls in some

contexts. With that said, however, these characterizations suggest that Thunberg’s rhetorical act

is more a reactive tit-for-tat, rather than the wise, cunning strategy that I see it as.

By reclaiming a term like “pirralha”—and “seriously annoying” as she does in the next

example—Thunberg promotes a positive image of an angry girl activist. Thunberg is modeling

for peers that being angry in service of a just cause can be good. She also models how to reshape

attacks of misplaced or immature anger into articulations of righteous anger. Given the

significance of observational learning (i.e. that people, especially young people, are learning

constantly about how to act by watching others act and noting the consequences and

reinforcements of their actions; see Bandura and Walters) for establishing teen norms, it matters

that young girls model transgressive behavior for large digital publics that include their peers. By

modeling non-normative anger, Thunberg helps change norms so that girl activists who express

anger are not immediately dismissed as “bratty,” as they historically have been.

Seriously Annoying

Thunberg took her bio warfare strategy on the offensive in response to a UK crime bill

introduced by Home Secretary Priti Patel, which passed through the House of Commons in

March 2021. Part Three of the 300-page “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill”

significantly expands police authority to restrict public assembly and protest. Previously, police

wanting to restrict protest had to prove that the protest threatened "serious public disorder,

serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community" (Casciani). Patel’s

bill, however, made “serious annoyance” and “serious inconvenience” (“Police, Crime,

Sentencing and Courts Bill” 53) caused by non-violent protest a crime punishable by fine or up

to 10 years in jail. The bill even imposes conditions on “one-person protests” (54) and puts the

right to decide what constitutes “serious annoyance” or “serious inconvenience” in the judgment

of the police officers at the scene of protest.

While the bill does not directly target Thunberg, it threatens the safety of the millions of

youth like her who, being legally unable to vote, must rely on peaceful protest as a primary

means of civic participation and political change. The language implies that adults find protesters

“annoying,” rather than righteously angry. Over 350 organizations in the UK and abroad

promptly argued that “seriously annoying” is too vague a term to ensure that the people’s

freedom of speech and right to protest will be protected. Thunberg was one of many who

immediately saw this bill as a dangerous infringement on the freedoms on which democratic

governance relies, particularly as authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide (Blinken). The

language “seriously annoying” also serves to belittle the righteous—and often peaceful—anger

of protesters.

This time, in a double-pronged act of bio warfare, Thunberg copy/pastes the language of

the bill into a tweet with an accompanying photo of her original one-person protest with text that

reads, sarcastically, “Definite cause of serious annoyance” (see Figure 7 below). She also uses

the bill’s language in yet another reclaimed, inverted, and ironic Twitter bio which reads,

“Seriously annoying.” (Figure 8 below.)

Figure 7. The image is a screenshot taken by the author of

Thunberg’s March 15, 2021 tweet described in the essay. The

screenshot includes one user’s response to the tweet that reads,

“Keep being seriously annoying please.” with a winking smiley

face emoji.

The photo Thunberg includes in her tweet (see Figure 7) is probably the single most

famous photo of Thunberg. It is the photo that represents her journey as an activist because it

depicts her at the very beginning of her one-girl protest in front of the Swedish Parliament. With

a now-famous, simple, hand-painted sign reading, “Skolstrejk for klimatet” [“school strike for

climate”] at her feet, Thunberg sits on the cobblestone path towards the government, waiting for

passersby to notice and engage, i.e. not annoying anyone and certainly not suspecting that within

the year she would be a globally celebrated activist. Referencing the arc of her successful

peaceful protest efforts with this image, Thunberg rejects the way Patel’s crime bill figures

activism as unruly, dangerous, and needing to be policed and instead affirms girls’ place in

protest, which, especially when enacted by girls and women, tends to be peaceful. As I discussed

in the introduction, underscored by examples from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King,

Jr., it is entirely possible and in fact common for peaceful protest to be angry and vice versa. In

combination with the peaceful image of herself calmly protesting alone, the tweet’s caption,

Figure 8. Screenshot by author of Thunberg’s Twitter

bio on March 15, 2019, which reads, “Seriously

annoying.”

“Definite cause of serious annoyance” reveals the ridiculousness of the bill’s effort to make even

one-person protests punishable by law.

Additionally, Thunberg uses the bio warfare strategy to wage her two-pronged

counterattack on behalf of the right to protest. Pasting “seriously annoying” in her Twitter bio,

just as she did with “pirralha,” Thunberg reclaims language used by conservative leaders to

malign activists, imbues it with positive meaning, and claims it as proudly central to her identity.

In aggregate with her other acts of bio warfare, Thunberg communicates to global publics that to

make meaningful, structural change, people (perhaps especially young women) need to be

willing to be seen as “brats” and “annoying,” or in other words, to step out of the historically

acceptable modes of behavior like docility, contentment, and politeness. Terms like “brat” and

“annoying” misconstrue righteous anger as immature, irrational, inappropriate behavior.

Enacting social change requires that girls and young women annoy, obstruct, challenge, and

persist. “Well behaved women rarely make history,” so the commonplace says. And a huge

number of people showed their public support for Thunberg’s act of strategic defiance. As one

Twitter user wrote, “For every hater, there are thousands of people who respect and love what

you do. Stay strong, stay seriously annoying” (Figure 9).

In the networked digital landscape, “stay seriously annoying” is just one of many ways

users engaged and recirculated Thunberg’s wise anger act of protest. Though any daring act will

garner immense criticism on Twitter, another seemingly infinite scroll of Twitter users amplified

Thunberg’s strategy by engaging positively with her use of “seriously annoying.” Supporters

around the world retweeted her tweet, replicated her use of “seriously annoying” in their own

bio, used the hashtag #SeriouslyAnnoying to praise her, offered examples from history of how

“seriously annoying” protest has helped enact positive social change, and more. The appendix of

screenshots I’ve compiled offers readers a preliminary glimpse at how Thunberg’s act of bio

warfare replicates, mutates, and circulates beyond her Twitter bio. Through each act of

engagement and amplification, Thunberg’s double message—that the right to protest is important

and that being “seriously annoying” in protest can be a good thing, even for teen girls—reaches

more girls, more teens, more parents, more educators, more lawmakers, etc. In short, as

Thunberg’s message gets spread, it helps nudge socially constructed and restrictive anger norms

in a more inclusive, liberatory direction. Here once again, Thunberg offers a powerful and

regularly amplified model for the constructiveness of teen girls’ wise anger.

Anger Management

Thunberg’s bio warfare strategy is perhaps best exemplified through her multiple Twitter

interactions with former US President, notoriously ableist and misogynist Donald Trump. The

first Twitter exchange with Trump occurred before Thunberg was named TIME Magazine

“Person of the Year,” before the exchange with Jair Bolsonaro, and just after she gave the UN

Climate Summit speech in New York in September 2019 that went quickly viral for her overtly

angry use of the refrain, “How dare you.”

In the 2019 UN Climate Summit speech, Thunberg cites numerous well-documented

scientific facts to issue an urgent warning to world leaders to stop talking and start acting to

prevent the impending climate catastrophe. For example, she articulates soundly that “the

popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying

below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human

control” (Thunberg as quoted by NPR staff). Yet, as often happens when girls and women are

angry in public political contexts, Thunberg’s anger, rather than the substance of her argument,

became the story. Mainstream news outlet headlines around the world described her as “raging

at,” “rebuking,” and “chiding” world leaders (see Irfan, Hertsgaard, Borenstein, respectively).

While at first, I was encouraged to see at least liberal-leaning news outlets implicitly celebrating

her courageous use of anger to reject oppressive gender roles and speak back to world leaders,

the fact remains that whether a given outlet was championing or condemning her anger, or

intending to “objectively report on it,” by centering it they declared her anger newsworthy. Their

headlines announce that, in keeping with historic sexist and ageist anger norms, anger in young

women is something other than an understandable, reasonable affect for a politically engaged

subject. It is sensational enough for a headline—transnationally.

But mainstream newspaper headlines were not the only ones to remark on Thunberg’s

anger. After the speech, Trump tweeted, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking

forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” Trump’s sarcasm here, capped with an

especially derisive, “So nice to see!” mocks Thunberg for appearing anything other than “very

happy,” since that is the only disposition patriarchy allows “young girls.” Autistic activist and

cultural critic Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha has analyzed how Trump’s attack is specifically

ableist, as well, since he mocks Thunberg for what Piepzna-Samarasinha calls her “Resting

Autism Face” or “being unable to smile on command.” I should note that it is this very

“inability” to smile on command that Piepzna-Samarasinha and other Thunberg supporters laud

for her refusal to put others’ comfort above her own righteous feelings about an unjust situation.

In multiple ways then, even Trump’s first noun phrase, “a very happy young girl,” shores up

millennia of sexist socialization that says girls’ anger, regardless of its cause, is unseemly,

untrustworthy, and a liability to their credibility, while boys’ anger is generally presumed

rational.

Thunberg, however, does not let Trump control the narrative. By once again promptly

copy/pasting the attempted insult directly into her Twitter bio, Thunberg asserts her

interpretation’s dominance over the meaning of his words and the meaning of being an angry

girl. Further, Thunberg takes his sexist words and makes them do feminist work for her,

weaponizing Trump’s language against him and his conservative followers in a signature act of

bio warfare. She changes her bio to read, “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright

and wonderful future.” Defining herself, for the moment, as “a very happy young girl looking

forward to a bright and wonderful future,” Thunberg beats Trump at his own game. She uses his

sarcastic words sarcastically to promote an identity and worldview that runs directly counter to

his—one that says that neither youth nor gender nor anger precludes reason. In the context of the

concerns she raised in her speech, which she supported with scientific facts and logical

argument, it is his words not hers that seem irrational and childish. Standing up for her own overt

expressions of anger in this case, and weaponizing his words against his conservative ideology in

her bio once again, Thunberg suggests that she is proud to seem other-than-happy for a future

that is other-than-bright-and-wonderful, perhaps because at least she is fighting for a future at

all.

In other words, Thunberg’s Twitter bio reclaims the normatively assigned positive affect

from “happy” to the anger she made visible in her speech. Because of the irrational behavior and

incompetence of world leaders, Thunberg implies, to be a happy young girl in today’s world is to

be irrational. Thus, she helps redefine how girls’ anger should be interpreted worldwide: as

capable of being rational and even wise. Contrary to the sexist history of oppressive emotion

norms, anger is a justified, even noble, response—a wise response demonstrating phronesis—

when an impending crisis is being ignored by those in charge. And this is true, as Thunberg

represents, for politically engaged girls, in addition to presumed-rational male adults.

Recontextualized on Thunberg’s profile, “looking forward to a bright and wonderful future” can

also read as a veiled threat to those who would stand in the way of her bright and wonderful

future, i.e. conservative politicians. In the world Thunberg references, the scientific, factual

world of systemic injustice, it is morally and socially correct to be angry when those in charge

have abdicated their responsibility to lead. The norms and dominant perception of girls’ anger,

Thunberg’s rhetoric suggests, need to change to accommodate that fact.

Trump’s efforts to malign Thunberg for her anger continue, becoming increasingly

explicit and authoritarian over time, to which Thunberg responds with increasingly aggressive

bio warfare. With more detail now, I return to the opening exchange, which took place three

months after the UN Climate Summit.

In December 2019, after TIME Magazine named Thunberg the “Person of the Year,”

Trump tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to

a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” As mentioned, Thunberg promptly

changed her Twitter bio to read: “A teenager working on her anger management problem.

Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.” By defining

Thunberg’s anger as a “problem” needing “Management,” and by telling her to chill and go

watch a movie with friends, Trump perpetuates the oppressive normative ideas that 1) teenage

anger is wrong and a problem, 2) as a teen, Thunberg shouldn’t concern herself with “adult

things” like politics or the climate, and 3) as a teen and a girl, she should be hanging out with

friends instead of doing serious and sustained political, activist work.

One way that Trump perpetuates all three of these ideas is by casting activism as a stand-

in for anger. Whereas the UN Climate Summit-related tweet was a response to perceptible

anger—anger Thunberg expressed through facial expression, vocal tone and intonation, and

language in the UN climate speech—in the Time Person of the Year instance, as discussed in this

essay’s introduction, there is no angry speech or anger referent at all, only the activism for which

TIME Magazine has chosen to celebrate her. Trump uses this positive attention from the media to

feminize and condemn activism by eliding it with teenage girl anger. Defining activism as an

inappropriate, feminized form of anger perpetuates the prohibition of girls’ and women’s anger

worldwide, further disenfranchising youth for whom activism is one of few modes of political

participation they have access to. Denigrating her activism also implicitly promotes Trump’s

authoritarian political philosophy because it suggests that activism is problematic, rather than an

important feature of a democratic society.

In this example, we can also see Thunberg’s explicit rejection of Trump’s attempt to

perpetuate oppressive sexist and ageist anger norms through his use of the capitalized term,

“Anger Management.” Using capitalization to turn “Anger Management” into a formal noun,

Trump lends weight and authority to a modality that pathologizes anger. As a concept, “anger

management” emerges from a neoliberal, patriarchal, psychological anger paradigm in which

anger poses a threat both to reason and to society. The corporate rhetorical framework of

“management” signals who the modality benefits most: the businesses that profit off workers

who bracket their emotions for maximal productivity. By contrast, in a trauma-informed

framework that puts human healing and social harmony above productivity, anger would be seen

as a sign that someone has been hurt and there is healing work to do. A systems-level analysis

would further point to the overlapping systems of oppression that cause anger-inducing harm at a

structural level beyond individualism, which is precisely what Thunberg uses anger to signal.

Trump’s word choice unsurprisingly invokes the Western corporate and dualistic framework that

sees reason and emotion as mutually exclusive and paints anger as suspect, rather than as an

intelligent signal that things are amiss. By repeating and recontextualizing his words, however,

as in the other examples, Thunberg invites audiences to question their appropriateness and

consider alternative interpretations, i.e. that her anger is warranted, reasonable, and even rational.

Reclaiming that she is “working on her anger management problem,” Thunberg does not get into

what she knows would be a futile debate nor defend herself. She merely reclaims Trump’s words

ironically to show her rejection of their backwards ideology.

In a more offensive adaptation of her strategy months later, Thunberg again repurposes

Trump’s language against him on Twitter, only this time, she uses a tweet rather than the Twitter

bio to launch a direct attack at his attempt to control the narrative of what appropriate anger

looks like.

In the months leading up to the 2020 US Presidential election, Trump had been

repeatedly tweeting in all caps about the election being fraudulent, a claim which has been

conclusively determined to have no evidentiary basis. In one instance, Trump tweets in all caps,

“STOP THE COUNT!” Thunberg promptly retweets his vigorous outburst, pasting his own

language from the prior bio warfare example into the body of the tweet. The tweet reads: “So

ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old

fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!” By using his own language verbatim

against him to highlight a much more definitively angry and less rational utterance, Thunberg

makes an offensive play on behalf of the legitimacy of her quote-unquote “angry” advocacy

relative to his. She calls out his hypocrisy and uses a cunning doubly-sarcastic strategy to make

him seem ridiculous, disrupting the oppressive stereotype that girls’ anger is always irrational

and unwise.

Deeply Disturbed

Thunberg has also used the bio warfare strategy in the body of her tweet in an exchange

with conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt. In an opinion piece, published in the Herald Sun

Blog section on August 1, 2019, Bolt called Thunberg “deeply disturbed” and warned audiences

to doubt her influence in a barely-veiled ableist attempt to use Thunberg’s neurodivergence to

malign her credibility. The essay, titled “The Disturbing Secret to the Cult of Greta Thunberg,” is

entirely concerned with delegitimizing her influence as a climate activist on the basis of her

gender, age, and alleged mental illness. Though the exigence for Bolt’s writing is left unsaid, the

timing of its publication suggests it was published in response to Thunberg’s invitation to speak

at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit.

Bolt uses hyperbolic and ableist language to cast Thunberg as untrustworthy. Bolt’s first

line reads, “No teenager is more freakishly influential than Greta Thunberg, the deeply disturbed

messiah of the global warming movement.” His word choices, “freakishly,” “deeply disturbed,”

“messiah,” and even “teenager,” are not subtle in their effort to depict Thunberg as irrational,

untrustworthy, and abject—for her youth, for her neurodivergence, and for her anger. Bolt’s

language casts Thunberg as someone to be feared and outcast for her difference, feeding into

age-old tropes that people with neurodivergence are monsters and that women capable of gaining

influence are witches. Empowered women who threaten the status quo have always been vilified

by those whom the status quo benefits. Bolt’s language draws on hateful, apocryphal stereotypes

to undermine Thunberg’s credibility.

Thunberg responds to Bolt in signature bio warfare fashion, though this time by Tweet,

that same day. Repeating and recontextualizing Bolt’s words, her tweet reads:

I am indeed ‘deeply disturbed’ about the fact that these hate and conspiracy campaigns

are allowed to go on and on and on just because we children communicate and act on the

science. Where are the adults?

Thunberg’s tweet applies her characteristic inversion of the conservative leader’s logic in order

to make the adult seem childish and herself and her allegedly emotional response seem more

reasonable. She reclaims language meant to insult and declares it as self-definitional, thereby

showing how the characterization is one she is proud to take on. In her understated tone,

Thunberg demonstrates that she is not the stereotype these adults try to slander her with, but

rather the emotions they are associated with are justified. Further, Thunberg’s inversion of their

logic delivered through a decidedly un-emotional tone further subverts the leader’s attempted

attack and makes him seem like the childish bully. Thunberg reveals that Bolt’s insults do not

address the substance of her arguments and instead try to discredit her on the basis of sexism,

ageism, and ableism alone. In a move most would see as more “mature,” Thunberg responds not

by stooping to his level, but by recontextualizing his hateful language and redirecting it back to

her substantive messaging. She also argues explicitly that the roles have been reversed when she

says that “hate and conspiracy campaigns” are less rational, mature, and reasonable than

“children communicat[ing] and act[ing] on the science.” In this situation, her message implies,

there has been a required inversion of the traditional roles precisely because the adults are not

acting rationally. The abdication of adult responsibility has produced a rupture in the facade of

normalcy through which engaged youth can demonstrate their civic capacity.

Further subverting the traditional adult-child roles, Thunberg’s act of bio warfare

demonstrates her own superior logic to Bolt’s. Thunberg calls herself “deeply disturbed,” but not

in the crass and “irrational” way Bolt intended. Thunberg is “deeply disturbed” morally and

intellectually by this adult opinion-leader’s effort to drum up hate and conspiracies to cast doubt

on an issue around which there is scientific consensus. In her inversion of Bolt’s words,

Thunberg shows that she is aligned with (rational, logical, systematic) science and he with

irrational conspiracy and emotional hate. Though in this way it can be said that she too plays into

the problematic reason-emotion binary, she does so strategically to gain credibility for herself as

a rhetor for this cause. By revealing these leaders’ poor logic; backwards ideas about youth,

gender, and authority; and immature tactics, Thunberg demonstrates to global publics that the old

stereotypes about girls and youth activists do not hold. To the contrary, today’s youth are

engaged and rational and sometimes wisely, righteously anger and warrant being heard in civic

matters that affect them. Young women like Thunberg are leading the charge.

Conclusion

In each of the incidents I’ve analyzed here, I hope to have illustrated the significance of

Thunberg’s “bio warfare.” Beyond simply “clapping back” at leaders, as so many news reports

suggest, Thunberg’s bio warfare strategy performs a deeper, more impactful digital-rhetorical

strategy by claiming opponents’ language as self-definitional, but with a twist. By weaponizing

opponents’ language against them, Thunberg’s Twitter bio attacks undermine conservative

leaders’ authority and the entire social paradigm their ideologies are rooted in, i.e. patriarchy,

ageism, ableism, and the pseudo-science that women, especially young women, are more

emotional and less rational than men. Though each of Thunberg’s acts that I have analyzed here

operate slightly differently, ranging from defensive to offensive maneuvers, they all reclaim,

replicate, mutate, and recirculate opponents’ language to invert intended sexist, ageist, and

ableist stereotypes and enable wise anger as a rhetorical mode available to teen girl rhetors.

As is true across my case studies, Thunberg’s political anger is neither reactive,

unthinking, nor uninformed. It is wise and should be understood in the long tradition of

Aristotle’s conception of moral, rational anger and phronesis, as well as in the tradition of Black

feminist thought, which recognizes anger in the marginalized as a tool of liberation. Further

research should attend to the details of how teens’ digital rhetoric circulates on and offline to

shift social norms, as well as consider how teen activists operating in a digital age use the

affordances of Twitter to work collaboratively to liberate girls’ anger for collective good.

In the next chapter, I analyze how Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard founder

Thandiwe Abdullah uses Instagram Stories to model a version of wise anger that is unique to

having grown up Black in an anti-Black racist United States of America. Abdullah specifically

addresses the intersection of racism and sexism with oppressive anger norms in their struggle for

anti-racist Black feminist liberation.

Chapter Two: Thandiwe Abdullah Uses

Instagram Stories to Model Regular

Eloquent Rage

I was lit up, and for some reason it seemed like all everyone around me wanted to

do was shut me up.

—Thandiwe Abdullah, “I March for Black Girls and the Black Women Who

Marched Before Me”

When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s bystander video of the police murder of George

Floyd went viral in late May 2020, protests erupted almost immediately and continued over the

ensuing days and weeks in over 140 cities across the country4. By early July, multiple polls

indicated that between 15 and 26 million people had participated in protests that summer as part

of what has come to be called the Black Lives Matter Movement (or BLM); these numbers make

BLM the largest social movement to date in US history (Buchanan et al.). Impressive on its own,

this rapid, large-scale mobilization of in-the-streets action is that much more remarkable given

the widespread fear of contact with strangers caused by the rapid spread of COVID-19.

Collective fear and uncertainty meant that people were more glued to their phones than ever in

order to both track updates to and seek distraction from the unfolding global health crisis. Visits

4 I would argue this was in itself an act of wise anger by a Black teen girl. I also want to acknowledge how

much it cost Frazier emotionally to make this brave stand against the police officers’ atrocious abuse of power. “It’s

been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically

interacting and not saving his life,” Frazier is quoted in a New York Times article (Bogel-Burroughs and Marie

Fazio).

to Instagram, for example, one of the five most popular social media platforms among youth

from Generation Z, increased by 43% from 2019 to 2020 (Volkmer).

Thandiwe Abdullah, who now uses they/them pronouns but was using she/her pronouns

at the time of this study, was one of a cohort of youth activists from Generation Z who was

posting regularly to Instagram surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests. An activist for Black

lives and racial justice since age 2, Abdullah founded the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard in

Los Angeles at age 12 in 2015. In June 2020, Abdullah was sixteen years old and had over

10,000 followers on Instagram, which they used to post across a range of purposes and emotional

registers. They reshared educational and snarky memes, for example, that challenge anti-Black

racism and white supremacy culture in the US. They shared unsmiling selfies with political

captions and posted silly pictures with friends. They posted documentation of themselves at

protests. They posted others’ analysis of current events and their own analyses typed out over

screenshots of articles. And more.

In this chapter, I argue that Black, then teen-girl, Black Lives Matter activist Thandiwe

Abdullah uses the Instagram Stories feature to normalize eloquent rage as a vital emotion in the

range of healthy, important emotions for Black girls--a range that regularly includes love, care,

joy, anger, and neutrality. Abdullah’s modeling of what I call “regular” eloquent rage on

Instagram helps to recast at least this one kind of wise anger as a constructive rhetorical mode for

Black teen activism. By “regular,” I mean that the eloquent rage they model is both ordinary, as

in “normal,” healthy, and unremarkable, and that it occurs with “regularity” via the repetition

and variation Abdullah uses in their Instagram Stories. “Eloquent rage” is a type of Black

feminist anger formulated by Brittney Cooper in her 2018 book of the same name. By combining

“regular” and “eloquent” as perhaps surprising joint qualifiers for Abdullah’s rage, I hope to jolt

readers out of commonplace reactions to the perceived anger of a Black teen girl like Abdullah in

this case study. Black girls’ anger is commonly perceived as excessive, irrational, and dangerous;

opposites of both “regular” and “eloquent”. By contrast, what Abdullah models, I argue, is an

anger that is informed, persuasive, clever, insightful, loving, and hope-driven, and that this anger

is not extraordinary nor is Abdullah extraordinary for modeling it. This dissertation chapter

elucidates Abdullah’s cunning deployment of regular eloquent rage using Instagram Stories

during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020.

Gender in This Case Study

As is likely evident in my language throughout this dissertation, I originally

conceptualized this dissertation project through the binary gendered framework of men’s vs.

women’s anger because I have approached the possible shifts in anger norms through a Western

historic lens, which has defined gender as binary. I have been interested in investigating

women’s anger because, as the non-dominant gender category, it is women’s anger that has been

historically marginalized, subordinated, and repressed. With that said, what I’m really invested in

is the liberation of all marginalized and non-dominant peoples’ anger as part of the larger

structural revolution away from oppressive hierarchical social relations and towards more

mutually respectful paradigms.

As a recent historian of rhetoric, I’m isolating this moment surrounding the Black Lives

Matter movement’s summer 2020 protests in this case study. As all historians must do, I have to

freeze the moment to understand it. This has presented an uncomfortable situation for me as

Abdullah changed their gender identity to nonbinary after I completed the research and drafting

of this chapter. Abdullah’s gender fluidity is not surprising in a moment when Generation Z is

challenging the binary conception of gender that has been taken for granted historically in

Western culture. Indeed, when I was researching Abdullah, they were already grappling with the

complexity of issues at the intersections of gender, race, and anger norms. When I started

following Abdullah in 2018, however, they were using she/her pronouns and speaking out about

their experiences growing up as a “Black girl.” In a 2019 interview with Refinery29, for

example, titled, “I March for Black Girls and the Black Women Who Marched Before Me,”

Abdullah describes how their experience of being a girl and being Black and being passionate

about social change were all intertwined for them. In this interview, Abdullah writes explicitly

about having to navigate the “angry Black girl” stereotype as a person committed to making the

world better. They write,

When I began doing movement work it was hard. I fell quickly into the angry Black girl

mold created for me by society. I called out teachers at school and never let anyone slide

when using the ‘N word pass.’ I was lit up, and for some reason it seemed like all

everyone around me wanted to do was shut me up.

It was this interview, in part, which made me want to center a dissertation chapter around

Abdullah. Evidence from interviews they gave in mainstream press articles suggested Abdullah

was intentionally pushing back against the “angry Black girl” stereotype that attempts to

discipline Black girls into quiet acquiescence to the status quo. It seemed like Abdullah would

appreciate the objectives of my own project and would see themself as aligned with its vision of

a future in which anger is understood not as a monolithic emotional category but one with

different kinds and different uses for different people in different contexts. This dissertation

advocates for a kind of anger that I believe Abdullah would also advocate: a wise anger that is

justified and entirely appropriate in the service of justice, especially for those Black girls whose

anger has been misunderstood and vilified at great cost to themselves and society.

I also appreciated how Abdullah was troubling the gender binary when I started

following them. Even when they were using she/her pronouns and describing her experiences as

a “girl,” they were challenging me to think more expansively about the gendered oppression of

anger. In the same Refinery29 interview, Abdullah describes how Black Lives Matter founders,

Patrisse Kahn Cullors, Opal Tometti, and Alicia Garza, were Abdullah’s “first real glimpse of

the power of Black queer women.” Abdullah continues: “They helped me begin to decolonize

and unlearn everything I thought I knew about what it meant to identify as she/her. They taught

me pronouns, they taught me gender fluidity, and all of the intricacies of blackness” (Abdullah).

Then, at some point during the two years after I had completed my research and drafted this

chapter, Abdullah moved to she/they pronouns and now they/them. I hope that this chapter does

not misgender them. I use their current pronouns out of respect to who they are today, now that I

am publishing this dissertation. But I do refer to them in the case study as a Black teen “girl”

because of the importance of their work to help dismantle the specific racist and sexist stereotype

of the “angry Black girl” during the summer 2020. Given Abdullah’s self-alignment with Black

queer women growing up, given that I gathered the data and wrote the chapter when they were

using she/her pronouns, and given their continuing references to gender fluidity over time, I

consider Abdullah an instructive example of a gender non-conforming Black queer person who

models eloquent rage in a way that is liberatory for young Black queer and gender

nonconforming persons and young Black women and girls, more generally.

Eloquent Rage

In her 2018 book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Black

Feminist Scholar and Professor Brittney Cooper tells the origin story of the titular phrase: A

former student at Howard University stops Cooper on campus to say, “I loved having you as my

professor. Your lectures were filled with rage. But it was, like, the most eloquent rage ever” (3).

At first, Cooper gets defensive because she is used to white people asking Black women why

they’re “so angry” as a means of discrediting Black women’s positions. The implication is that

“angry” as in “emotional” necessarily means “irrational” and thus “non-credible.” However,

“eloquent rage,” Cooper later realizes, is neither an insult nor a charge of irrationality. The

student, Cooper writes, “helped me to realize that my anger could be a powerful force for good.

She had called my rage eloquent. Clear. Expressive. To the point. In her estimation, it had made

me a good teacher, and it had inspired her and other students” (4-5). Building on the work of

foundational Black Feminist theorist Audre Lorde, Cooper argues that rage rooted in the

informed perception of injustice can be clarifying, healthy, powerful, and constructive. Thinking

with Lorde, Cooper notes that Black women’s rage can be particularly illuminating, illuminated

as it is by its location at the intersection of multiple oppressed positionalities. When emerging

from Black feminist consciousness and articulated effectively, rage can be eloquent, and

eloquent rage can build more just worlds.

Cooper’s Black feminist conception of eloquent rage works as a corrective to a multiple

millenia-long prohibition on women’s anger, as discussed in the dissertation’s introduction.

Throughout history, women’s perspectives, if expressed with even a hint of anger—and

sometimes even without—have most often been silenced, mocked, ignored, or vilified. For Black

women speaking to predominantly white audiences, the consequences have been more violent

and more oppressive. Add youth to the intersection of identities and social positions and it is

easy to see how young Black queer women’s perspectives are among the most vulnerable to

being undermined in the public sphere if expressed with non-normative anger.

Abdullah, I argue, enacts and affirms eloquent rage strategically using Instagram.

Particularly through their Instagram Stories posts surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests

between May and August 2020, they model an eloquent rage that they make “regular” for Black

girls like Abdullah at the time.

Instagram Stories of Eloquent Rage: Temporality and Kairos

With some means of cultural production in their own hands at all times thanks to social

media and the ubiquity of cell phones, young people in Generation Z have been able to create

new norms by modeling the behavior they want to see to audiences of peers and others who

choose to follow them. Modeling behavior that defies stereotypes is one strategy to undermine

those stereotypes, in part by diversifying and adding nuance and context to the representation of

the group the stereotype oppresses. I suspect, somewhat disappointingly, that publics need to

have alternative paradigms modeled for them repeatedly and compellingly for norms to change.

This is precisely what Abdullah accomplishes using Instagram Stories. Abdullah uses the

affordances of Instagram Stories to create a narrative over time that frames their anger as

eloquent and regular.

Instagram Stories was a feature introduced on October 6, 2010 to offer a place where

users can post content that disappears after 24 hours, in contrast with how Instagram functioned

previously through posts to user’s profiles that last indefinitely there. Instagram modeled

“Stories” after the nearly identical signature feature of SnapChat (Leaver, Highfield and Abidin).

Through Stories, Instagram users can post photos and videos, repost others’ posts, and as of more

recently, post text only. There are options to add different kinds of media layered over each

Story, including emojis, gifs, music, and surveys, as well as the option to tag other accounts

using the @ symbol or link to other related stories using the # symbol. The content posted to

Stories disappears after 24 hours and users have to click on a Story icon at the top of their feed in

order to view Stories once they’ve opened the app. Clicking on one story initiates the autoplay of

other stories, which appear in an order determined by one of Instagram’s proprietary algorithms.

Experts suggest the algorithm is at least in part determined by whose Stories and posts users tend

to watch and interact with. Each Story disappears from followers’ Stories feeds after 24 hours,

although the Stories actually live on indefinitely if a user has interacted with the Story in the

Messages section of the app. Because of their ostensibly 24-hour limited lifespan, users tend to

post content to Stories that is “of the moment.” This means it is either of urgent and/or fleeting

temporal relevance and/or that it is not something the user intends to live on forever. Because

users can post as many Stories as they want each day and they will only be accessible for 24

hours, the Stories space invites lower-stakes content posting and sharing. Users don’t feel like

they need to say something extraordinary or overthink what they post to Stories because Stories

are usually viewed for a few seconds at a time and disappear by the next day. I consider the

“Stories” feature and ones like it on Snapchat and TikTok as enabling a new genre of

storytelling: multimodal microstories. Somewhat akin to the novella or short story or flash

fiction, these multimodal microstories allow content creators to write their own microstories

furnished by the material from their everyday lives. On the side of the viewer, multimodal

microstories allow users of these visual storytelling platforms to diversify their exposure to

“everyday others’” stories, if they so choose—as opposed to only consuming fictional stories

and/or the social media stories produced by celebrities. The temporality of the multimodal

microstories is a fleeting one, one formed in the trenches of everyday lived life.

Abdullah uses this bountiful-but-ephemeral everyday temporality of Instagram Stories as

a rhetorical strategy in itself. By sharing wisely angry content in quotidian posts that combine

activism, anger, and other “regular” activities and emotions of a teen girl’s daily life in various

combinations, Abdullah uses the “everyday” temporality of Instagram Stories to normalize their

anger. Because of the Instagram Stories’ discourse norms to post frequently about whatever is

happening that day, Abdullah’s multiple daily posts read to their followers as brief, fleeting,

ordinary snippets from their everyday life. Especially because Abdullah’s Instagram account

appears to be personal, rather than designed to project a particularly constructed persona or brand

on behalf of a particular movement, organization, or cause, Abdullah’s content reads as that of an

“ordinary” activist teen girl, which helps to frame their anger as ordinary, as I will discuss.

With a follower count at the time around 10,000, it is reasonable to assume that when

Abdullah imagines their audience while creating content, they know their posts circulate well

beyond their immediate friends and family, but not so widely that they enter full-blown celebrity

territory. Most of Abdullah’s content from the summer of 2020 reflects their primary use of

Instagram to communicate with peers and adults who have some interest in the Black Lives

Matter movement and/or Abdullah as a person. They regularly posted content related to current

events and often sought to inform activists with urgent information either about action that was

going to happen or which had recently taken place. Across multiple posts almost every day, thus,

Abdullah’s Instagram followers see their unabashed performance of Black feminist anger

intermixed with joyful images of themself protesting with friends, apolitical images of themself

eating ramen noodles with pleasure, and longer text-based posts that articulate eloquent political

arguments about racial justice, islamophobia, and justice for Palestine. This mixture of angry,

joyful, pleasureful, and traditional intellectual content is at the heart of the regular eloquent rage

strategy this chapter theorizes. Abdullah invents this digital rhetorical strategy to defy the

irrationally angry Black girl stereotype and recontextualize anger as an ordinary, important, and

intelligent part of a Black teen girl’s daily life for Abdullah’s followers.

The sociopolitical timing has been strategic for young people like Abdullah to reclaim

anger since President Trump’s run for office in 2016 brought feminist anger, including though

less visibly youth anger, more loudly into popular discourse, as discussed in the dissertation’s

introduction. With the significance of women’s anger as a popular topic of debate, Instagram is a

strategic place and the summer 2020 a strategic moment for a teen girl, particularly a Black teen

girl, to display anger. The national conversation surrounding women’s anger meant that perhaps

publics would be able to think critically about any negative automatic reaction they might have

to a young Black person’s anger. Regardless of the rhetor’s gender, age, or race, it has long been

documented that anger alienates the opposition and draws out defensiveness in the listener

(Aristotle, Condit). Because of the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype and what Robin DiAngelo

terms “white fragility,” white people have never been willing or able to listen to Black women

express themselves with any hint of anger (see Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks,

Robin DiAngelo), let alone young Black women in a culture that does not respect the intellect of

young people, women, nor Black people, broadly speaking.

On Instagram Stories, however, young Black women can more safely assume a largely

sympathetic audience of peers since followers must seek out the accounts they follow and opt-in

to seeing their content both by following and by clicking to play the Stories. With that said,

Abdullah’s account is public. Given how common internet bullying and harassment is, Abdullah

is wise not to assume that their audiences are entirely sympathetic. But it would be safe to

assume that the majority of their followers are there because they’re interested in what Abdullah

has to say. Moreover, whereas a young Black girl’s anger may normally elicit antagonistic

feeling in audiences encultured within anti-Black racism, when anger gets modeled from the safe

distance of the Instagram screen in one’s hand, however, I wonder if it poses less of a threat and

can perhaps more easily enter the subconscious as a “normal,” “appropriate,” and/or sympathetic

emotion. By performing unapologetic anger on Instagram, Abdullah normalizes anger as a

reasonable and acceptable response for young Black women to social injustice.

Methods and Ethical Concerns

I started following Thandiwe Abdullah on Instagram in May 2020 after noticing them in

numerous popular press articles that discussed contemporary teen activists. In June 2020, I

started screenshotting Abdullah’s posts and stories5. I gathered a body of 150+ Stories and

profile posts and stored the screenshots in Google Photos, organized chronologically. I then used

grounded theory, drawing from Oktay and Osorio, to spend time reading, re-reading, and

rhetorically analyzing the posts to allow for meaningful categories to emerge. Then using Google

Slides, I coded the posts by the emergent categories and started writing my analysis.

In this chapter, I use Kirsch and Royster’s feminist rhetorical method of “tacking in” and

“tacking out,” drawn from Interpretation by Clifford Geertz, to toggle between close textual

analysis of individual posts and a more distant analysis of how the posts work in aggregate. My

goal is to paint a full picture of how Abdullah expresses rage in a specific variety of ways that I

5 I later submitted an IRB study application for this work. Instagram Stories are designed to disappear after

24 hours, so even though Abdullah had set their Instagram account to public and had over 10,000 followers, I was

concerned about the ethics of publishing content that Abdullah intended to last for only 24 hours. The Independent

Review Board determined that the research did not need IRB approval because the study “does not meet the

definition of human subject research under the purview of the IRB according to federal regulations.” Since drafting

this chapter, however, Computers and Writing published a special issue on the ethics of new media scholarship

titled, “Rhetorics of Data: Collection, Consent, & Critical Digital Literacies,” edited by Les Hutchinson Campos,

Maria Novotny. Authors in this special collection challenged scholars to go beyond the IRB minimum requirements

to think more expansively and with more nuance about how to do ethical research with data from social media.

Before taking this work any further beyond the dissertation, I hope to be able to talk with Abdullah and other

scholars about the ethics of publishing this research.

analyze and that in the combination and aggregate of these expressions, Abdullah makes an

argument for the simultaneous ordinariness and eloquence of their rage. As mentioned above,

this paradoxical combination of terms contradicts the controlling stereotype of Black girls’ anger

as excessive and inarticulate, uninformed, or irrational. It is through both close analysis of how

rage operates in individual posts and in combination with other posts that the regular eloquence

of Abdullah’s rage is revealed.

In the analysis sections below, I start with a single selfie video Abdullah posts of

themself speaking at a protest to consider how Abdullah deploys eloquent rage at one of many

protests they attend before tacking out to a recurring motif of middle fingers across multiple

posts. In aggregate, these middle fingers convey an ordinariness to their anger. In combination

with the other posts, the middle fingers gain eloquence that they might not convey if taken out of

context. To demonstrate this last point more thoroughly, I zoom into a selection of their Stories

posts between May and August 2020 in the third analysis section to show how it is through the

recurring combination of posts across several specific registers, including varieties of anger, that

Abdullah conveys the “regularity” of their anger. Through the repetition of this range of registers

over time, which includes the neutral register of political analysis, Abdullah conveys the

“eloquence” of their regularly occurring rage. Taken altogether, I hope to show how Abdullah

deploys “regular eloquent rage” as a kind of wise anger that is uniquely informed by Abdullah’s

race and positionality as a Gen Z Black teen girl activist fighting against anti-Black racist sexist

imperialist exploitative capitalism in the United States. Before I turn to the analysis, however, I

must first elaborate further Abdullah’s anti-respectability politics, which are central to their

regular eloquent rage strategy.

The first analysis subsection titled, “This Shit is Violence” uses close reading to analyze

how Abdullah deploys eloquent rage in a protest speech. Notably Abdullah posted to the more

enduring Instagram feature of IGTV (which does not disappear videos after 24 hours) and

circulates the video via Stories. The next subsection, “Middle Fingers Motif” analyzes the

pattern of using middle fingers that recurs across multiple posts, in addition to close-reading the

posts themselves to see how they work on their own and collectively to convey unapologetic but

often joyful anger and defy what I call sexist “smile culture.” Finally, in the subsection titled,

“Stories of Eloquent Rage,” I use Gesa Kirsch and Jackie Jones Royster’s method of “tacking

out” to analyze the rhetoric-in-toto that Abdullah achieves through their combination of

emotional registers and rhetorical purposes through the temporality of the Instagram Stories. All

of these strategies combine to produce what I call Abdullah’s “regular eloquent rage” strategy, a

strategy that models one Black queer girl’s wise anger.

Anti-Respectability Politics

Abdullah’s politics are grounded in the Black Feminist, anti-respectability politics at the

heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though it is misleading to suggest that all

participants and even all organizers of this movement share the same politics, Black Feminism

and anti-respectability are widely acknowledged as foundational philosophies to the movement’s

vision (Board Jr, Marcus, et al). What these philosophies mean is that most fundamentally, the

movement seeks to reclaim humanity for everyone who lives in an anti-Black racist culture by

reclaiming humanity for all black lives—not just those deemed “respectable” by white and Black

audiences. Respectability politics stem from the 19th century when Black church women

promoted norms of comportment drawn from Black Baptist church culture and white middle-

class womanhood in an effort to “uplift the Black race” (Harris). Respectability requires

appearing well-mannered, polite, and friendly. Any outward expression of rage, confrontation, or

even not dressing in accordance with church culture or middle-class femininity defies the

respectability code. Though the complex history of respectability falls outside the scope of this

chapter, it is important to note that though today’s youth see respectability as an obstacle to

liberation (Cooper Beyond Respectability), scholars have excavated the important, liberatory role

respectability politics once played for Black communities (see Higginbotham).

Today, as Osagie K Obasogie and Zachary Newman have noted, “the terms of the debate

on police violence advanced by the Black Lives Matter movement is steeped in an opposition to

respectability” (544). In other words, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its anti-

respectability theory into mainstream discourse about systemically racist police violence.

Opposition to respectability means challenging the idea that Black people need to emulate

“polite” culture in order to merit dignity. Or, as Obasogie and Newman write, “…regardless of

any ostensibly non-respectable behavior--from [Trayvon] Martin’s hoodie to Eric Garner selling

loose cigarettes--their lives matter and should not be treated with deadly force” (541).

Importantly, despite the success the movement has had raising awareness around anti-Black

racism and white supremacy culture, the anti-respectability aspect of their ideology has yet to

garner much discussion in the mainstream press. I believe liberating Black anger and revealing

the racist undertones to respectability go hand in hand. On Instagram, Abduallah’s refusal to

observe respectability decorum norms, their promotion of ideals of anti-respectability politics,

and their strategic reclaiming of anger as rational offers a model for what anti-respectability

politics can look like in daily life. Instead of debating anti-respectability politics, Abdullah

embodies them repeatedly through their Instagram posts.

In the sections that follow, I analyze a variety of Abdullah’s Instagram content in order to

argue that through both singular and ongoing rhetorical strategies, Abdullah helps normalize

eloquent rage among American youth activists today.

“This Shit is Violence”: Protest Speech Video

In a video titled, “We Are The Revolution,” posted on June 5, 2020, Abdullah is pictured

speaking into a bullhorn to a dense crowd of supportive protesters at a rally against the Los

Angeles Police Department’s ongoing epidemic of anti-Black racism. The video’s caption reads,

“ALL systems of oppression must crumble. Jackie Lacey must go. Eric Garcetti must go.

Michael Moore must go. KILLER COPS MUST GO. #blacklivesmatter.” As the caption

suggests, the crowd is there to protest Los Angeles Attorney General Jackie Lacey, Mayor Eric

Garcetti, and Police Chief of Police Michael Moore for what the protesters perceive to be their

racist mishandling of law enforcement and general city governance. In the video, Abdullah is

pictured speaking into a microphone to a tightly packed crowd in a street in front of what looks

like a government building. In a loose-fitting, pale, tie-dyed tee-shirt, Abdullah stands head and

shoulders above the crowd wearing a mask that is pulled down below their chin as they hold a

microphone close to their lips. Abdullah’s hair is in their then-signature loose Afro pigtails with

a folded bandana framing their hairline.

In the speech, Abdullah initially uses warm smiles and other gestural rhetoric signifying

conviviality and confidence to draw their audience into identifying with them. Over the course of

the speech, Abdullah’s tone becomes increasingly angry, raw, and vulnerable, deftly rousing the

crowd to feel Abdullah’s anger as justified in the speech’s climax. At the outset, and again at the

end of the speech and video, Abdullah appears calm, confident, and in control. Abdullah’s

rhetorical deployment of emotion combined with expert timing in their delivery makes for a

moving speech that is met by overwhelming affirmation from the crowd. By successfully

performing righteous activist anger in a speech interwoven with other registers like humor and

humility, which circulated online to over 100,000 viewers as of November 2020, Abdullah

helped to normalize that a young Black girl’s anger can be righteous, rational, informed, and

rhetorically effective.

Abdullah’s first move when they raise the megaphone to their mouth is to establish the

protesters as determined, consistent, and caring, contrary to stereotypes that paint activism and

anger as irrational and immature. Abdullah starts their speech by commenting on the sustained

efforts of activists when they say: “I know you been out here a long time. And I’m sorry that you

have to be out here a long time, but whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, right?” The crowd

cheers in support. “We [protesters] have been out here for two and a half years in front of Jackie

Lacey’s office, every Wednesday from 4-6pm,” they continue, emphasizing through repetition

with added detail that this movement is ongoing and the protestors are persistent. Based on the

affirming sounds coming from the crowd, Abdullah has effectively started engaging the crowd

and drawing the protesters’ support.

Demonstrating exigence for the cause of racial justice, that connects their personal

experience with the structural issue of police violence, Abdullah then tells a story about District

Attorney Jackie Lacey’s husband pointing a gun in their mom’s face. Abdullah’s mom had

knocked on the door to express a complaint. Abdullah uses this story to argue that something is

wrong when a high schooler has to watch the husband of an elected official point a gun in their

mom’s face from their high school classroom’s TV. They continue: "There's a war on black

bodies. There's a war on me.” As they say this, they open their arms wide so that the last few

words are not mic-ed, making the statement even more powerful, more stirring. They seem more

vulnerable without the amplification of their voice and it makes the speech seem more personal,

more intimate. We hear their voice alone, unmodified, unamplified-- just one voice in a big

crowd, like they are then just one Black girl in a big anti-Black-girl world. Through this

performance of their own vulnerability, Abdullah prepares the audience to empathize with the

rage that is to come.

In the final two minutes of their speech, Abdullah’s energy and anger swells as they

deliver what feels like a grand finale. Their pace, volume, and intensity are heightened for the

last 60 seconds or so as they seemingly throw off any restraint and emotionally castigate LA

public officials and government leaders for being “accessories to murder.” They scream into the

mic:

[Jackie Lacey,] Prosecute yourself for being a damn accessory to murder, bitch. And you

too, Eric Garcetti. Y'all are accessories to murder. I wanna see you rot! I wanna see you

*rot* in jail! For the destruction and violence you have done against our communities.

And I wanna see the media, that shit is violence. This shit is violence. This fucking

national guard and the police that patrol our streets and over police us. That is violence!

[cheers] I feel threatened! I'm tired of hands up don't shoot, this is a revolution y'all.

They smile then, their tone softening. They laugh a little, bashfully, and say, "I appreciate the

unity and solidarity that y'all have shown by coming out today. And, yeah, thank you." The

crowd audibly supports them, affirming their anger through raucous applause. As quoted above,

Abdullah swears often during the climax and almost every swear word is met with audible

approval from the crowd. It is important to note that crowd’s cheers in response to Abdullah’s

anger ring out as affirming and supportive. The crowd cheers in a way that signals passion,

righteous activist anger, and mutual admiration for then 16-year-old Abdullah. Their anger is

heard and taken seriously in the context of this protest. The audience seems to feel Abdullah’s

pain.

By documenting the speech and the crowd’s reaction and circulating it through Instagram

TV, Abdullah can model not only their own righteous anger, but the appropriate (read

sympathetic) response to it for a larger public audience. Posting the video to the IGTV section,

Abdullah enables the 9-minute video to be played as one continuous video clip. Posting to IGTV

also means the video will remain viewable indefinitely. By also posting the video to Stories,

Abdullah increases its immediate circulation among their followers. As of October 23, 2020, the

video had 118,844 views and 143 comments. Despite having only ~10,000 followers at the time

of this writing in November 2020, Abdullah is able to reach over 100,000 viewers with the

video, modeling eloquent rage embodied through a Black teen girl’s protest speech.

Because Abdullah establishes themself as a reasonable rhetor, their rage-filled climax

defies both the typical “respectability” response that would rebuke them for feeding into the

“angry Black woman” stereotype and the typical racist, sexist, and ageist racist response that

would read their anger as evidence of their “angry Black woman” irrationality. These historical

commonplace interpretations of Black women’s and Black girls’ anger mean that Abdullah takes

significant risk when they scream, “prosecute yourself for being a damn accessory to murder,

bitch.” There are countless accounts written by Black women documenting that they go to great

lengths in order to avoid appearing angry because a hint of anger has historically allowed any

remotely unsympathetic audience to dismiss whatever the Black rhetor is saying (Hill Collins,

Mckenzie, West, Harris-Perry, Judd). In this part of the speech, Abdullah is not interested in

appeasing anti-Black onlookers nor anyone who cannot empathize with their anger. They reclaim

their right to anger by displaying it with the full confidence of someone who is fed up with a

society that can’t make sense of it. Because they have built their “rational” premise so

thoroughly beforehand through stories that lend reasonability to her anger and through the

deployment of a “reasonable” affect leading up to the climax, they have prepared any potentially

unsympathetic audience to identify with the rawness of their rage, or at least to find it

legible. Social media platforms afford young people the opportunity to compose their own

context for public speech, rather than always being read against a backdrop of the adult-

composed public sphere.

This protest video is just one single example of how Abdullah models eloquent rage as a

justified anger for a Black teen. I now tack out to the continuous deployment of a “regular

eloquent rage” motif that Abdullah uses in their overall oeuvre of posts on Instagram: the middle

finger.

Middle Finger Motif

In the Instagram Stories posts that I analyze below, Abdullah incorporates middle fingers

across a variety of registers of content. The motif of the middle finger, I argue, is not only an

affront to the outlawing of anger for young women, Black women, and young Black women, but

it is also a refusal to perpetuate what I call “smile culture.” While smile culture and respectability

reference different genealogies of cultural norms, they overlap around the cultural imperative

that Black women must smile and seem approachable to men. Refusing smile culture by posting

unsmiling selfies with middle fingers out is one way that Abdullah challenges respectability

politics.

Figures 1 and 2 below demonstrate an unapologetic, unsmiling use of middle fingers. The

captions are minimal. The message communicated is an act of confrontation with minimal

explanation justified. In Figure 1, for example, readers see a screenshot of an image of a colorful

illustration of a woman of color with lipstick, painted nails, jewelry, long flowing hair, and her

middle fingers out. The woman is not smiling. There is no caption. Because of the lack of

caption, the specific meaning of the gesture is ambiguous, or rather, the object of the middle

fingers is ambiguous, but the gesture is clear because of its near universal meaning: “fuck you.”

Figure 2 shows Abdullah sitting casually in their bedroom. They are slightly slouched over,

looking to the bottom left of the viewer’s screen, wearing a black bandana, round red-lensed

glasses, and a Bernie Sanders tee-shirt. They have one middle finger up to the camera and

they’re not smiling. The caption reads, “Anyways…ACAB” with a brown middle finger emoji

next to the text. (ACAB stands for All Cops Are Bastards, a slogan of the movement to defund

the police and direct resources to social services that promote health in communities instead.)

These are just two of many instances where Abdullah features women or female-presenting

Figure 1. A medium-dark skinned brown

woman with long, wavy black hair holds

up two middle fingers to frame her face.

She looks directly at the viewer, unsmiling.

Figure 2. Abdullah holds up a middle

finger in an unsmiling selfie with the

caption, “Anyways…ACAB” plus the

brown middle finger emoji.

figures, herself or others, holding their middle finger(s) out

to the camera in a gesture that says, “I am angry and I don’t care

what you think.” In other words, the anger is reasonable

and justified. While one of these images may not mean much, it is

in their accumulation over time, I contend, which Instagram

Stories uniquely affords, that allows them to function as a

normalizing rhetorical force.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 show posts Abdullah published to

Instagram Stories that comprise pictures of themself with their

friends, some or all of whom hold up middle fingers. Abdullah

adds captions over the photos to explain the object of the ire. Across the two screenshots pictured

Figure 3. (At left) Screenshot of Abdullah’s

Instagram Story post picturing four teen women

and a caption that reads, “me and my homies side

eyeing all the individuals that are encouraging

folx to vote, but have disappeared from the streets

now that BLM isn’t trending.

Figure 4. (Above) An enlarged portion of

Figure 3 showing that two of the four teen

girls are sticking out their middle fingers with

a red oval added for emphasis.

here, Abdullah’s followers see that Abdullah is unafraid to express anger at political issues and

even confront those who are not doing their part. Abdullah’s juxtaposition with friends also

makes a visual argument of solidarity across social difference. In Figure 3, Abdullah’s caption

indicates that they and their friends are angry about people who advocate voting but have not

sustained their own participation in the Black Lives Matter movement protests. Abdullah’s

textual caption on the image reads: “me and my homies side-eyeing all the individuals that are

encouraging folx to vote, but have disappeared from the streets now that BLM isn’t trending

anymore.” Abdullah complements the gestural visual rhetoric of the middle finger in the image

with the gestural imagery of the verb “side-eye.” In this multimodal, multilayered rhetoric,

Abdullah conveys their own and their friends’ embodied, rational, and unapologetic frustration,

annoyance, and anger. Through strategic captions, Abdullah contextualizes their anger within an

of-the-moment political analysis about ineffectual and insincere activism. By doing so on their

public Instagram Stories, they are not just describing the situation with anger, either. Given their

following of 10,000+ followers, they are likely confronting many of the “individuals” the caption

describes. Furthermore, Abdullah appears in the photo flanked by three apparently female

friends, two of whom appear Black and one white. In this visual rhetoric of solidarity, Abdullah

shows they are not alone individually nor racially in their anger. Black and white girls alike, the

image suggests, are angry at desultory activists.

Figure 5 (below) is less directly confrontational than Figure 3, as it does not call out

individuals who have disappeared from the streets, but like Figure 3, Figure 5 shows that

Abdullah is not alone with their anger and connects these youth’s anger to its political object:

police brutality. Abdullah’s caption reads, “all my homies want to DEFUND THE POLICE.”

Like in Figure 3, Abdullah represents themself visually and textually (“all my homies”) as part of

a cohort of racially diverse, angry friends from Generation Z. Across these two posts, viewers

see that it’s not just Black girls who are angry, which may lend help increase the diversity of

Abdullah’s Instagram audiences. Through the visual rhetoric of these group pictures, Abdullah

shows that diverse youth activists are angry about police brutality and anti-Black racism and are

willing to take a stand in their anger publicly.

Part of what makes these Story posts so powerful is their noticeable defiance of what I

call “smile culture.” Smile culture, as I define it in the introduction, describes the patriarchal and

sexist cultural imperative for women to always appear pretty and accommodating, which

includes smiling when in public. As the introduction attests and the conclusion elaborates on, the

Figure 5. (Above) Abdullah and

two white peers, all wearing

protective face masks, all with

their middle fingers out.

sexist norm that men tell women to smile in public is well documented across patriarchal

cultures. Abdullah’s frequent posting of unapologetic smile-defiant selfies reflects a larger trend

I have noticed among young feminists to use social media defy the imperative that young women

exist to be pretty for the pleasure of men. This defiance often takes the gestural rhetorical form of

unsmiling, direct eye contact, and middle fingers out.

Abdullah’s middle finger motif is especially potent, as I see it, because it functions at the

intersection of smile culture and selfie culture. Selfie culture refers to the popular trend that

young women take photos of themselves, usually on a cell phone, and post these photos to social

media. The trend is so popular entire industries have formed to capitalize on the global

phenomenon of young women taking and posting photos of themselves in aesthetically pleasing

surroundings. The significance of selfies is fraught. Critics contend selfie culture reflects young

women’s narcissism, vanity, vacuousness, pathology, and/or self-objectification (Senft and

Baym). Many of these critiques, as Senft and Baym show, do little more than perpetuate sexist

and ageist stereotypes about girls as unserious, superficial, and/or unintelligent. Supporters

contend that selfies can be a form of self-love and a way to build and assert confidence in a

world that belittles young women. Either way, in most selfies, young women post photos

designed to flatter their features and make them look pretty, whether with a smile or the popular

pouty face, similarly designed to seduce and not alienate. Abdullah’s selfies, however, are not

designed to seduce. Abdullah’s selfies often include the middle finger and/or captions that

express anger and/or political analysis. Though Abdullah never names the cultural imperative for

women to smile and be pretty, Abdullah challenges smile culture consistently in action rather

than words. Abdullah rarely posts pictures of themself smiling.

As the circulation of unsmiling selfies increases due to the easy posting Instagram

affords, a new norm takes place in the self-fulfilling cycle that social media allows: the more

young people see peers making not-smiling look good, more young people post photos of

themselves not smiling. The timing is ripe for young women to refuse hegemonic smile culture

and assert a different norm. In a moment of cultural shifting, Abdullah and many of their peers

are wise to seize their own means of cultural production that social media affords in order to

change the sexist norms that dictate who must smile and who gets to be angry. Abdullah’s

refusal to perpetuate smile culture to their audience of over 10k followers is one example of the

relatively new trend for young feminists to use digital emotional rhetorics to take a public stand

against patriarchal norms in support of the emotional liberation of young women.

Finally, through regular posts, often made multiple times per day, Abdullah uses a variety

of unapologetic, rhetorical rage in order to systematically reclaim anger for young Black people

on an ongoing basis, as I will discuss in the next section. Beyond a single instance of virality, it

is this strategy of continuity and accumulation that helps Abdullah’s anger reclamation efforts

have the potential to change cultural norms.

Stories of Regular Eloquent Rage

Tacking out now to look at Abdullah’s use of Instagram Stories in chronological order

over time, I argue that Abdullah uses the ephemeral, daily, recurring temporality of the

Instagram Stories feature as a rhetorical strategy to give nuance and depth to Abdullah’s wise

anger and show it to be an integral part of a Black teen activist’s daily life. From educational and

snarky memes that challenge anti-Black racism and white supremacy culture in the US, to

unsmiling selfies and pictures with friends, to more and less descriptively captioned selfies with

their middle finger(s) out, Abdullah posts to Instagram Stories across a range of purposes and

emotional registers. Anger is but one of a few primary mood motifs, and there are different

shades of anger. It is precisely this repetition and variation across a handful of common purposes

and registers that helps to reframe and reclaim anger as a reasonable, righteous, healthy, and

appropriate emotion for young Black women.

In the section that follows, I present a small sample of the larger body of posts I gathered

and coded into four primary purposes and four primary mood motifs. The primary purposes I

identified are: selfie or personal-sharing, info-sharing, analytical, and educational. The four

primary mood motifs are: neutral, joyful or loving, angry, and lovingly confrontational. Using

this small but representative sample of Abdullah’s Stories posts from mid-June to mid-July 2020,

present my analysis of how these posts help to normalize eloquent rage for young Black women.

Figure 6 "We Are The Revolution"

Figure 7 "Calling all Black girl

activists!"

Figure 8 “When she puts you on her

bullhorn”

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Figure 6 shows a screenshot of the protest speech video, “We Are the Revolution,” which

I discussed in the first analysis section of this chapter. I include it here to show that I am now

tacking out from the close reading of the single video to a more distant reading of the sequence

of moods and purposes that Abdullah posts rhetorically. I also include Figure 6 in this sample to

show that it occurred early in the selection of screenshots I gathered over the summer 2020.

Next, Figure 7 shows a Stories post in which Abdullah reshares an illustrated infographic

post from an organization called Justice for Black Girls in which they solicit applications from

Black girl activists under age 25 who are “on the frontlines needing immediate support.”

Abdullah has added their own text over the reshare that reads, “If you are a black girl activist in

need of financial relief please apply at @justice4blackgirls.” This is an example of a post with

“info-sharing” purpose and “joyful or loving” in the mood motif taxonomy because Abdullah is

using Instagram Stories to circulate information that will benefit Black girl activists like themself

at the time.

Figure 8 shows Abdullah resharing a photo-based post from what I infer to be a friend of

theirs. The photo shows what appears to be another friend-- a teen-looking, male-presenting

person of color-- smiling into the camera behind a megaphone. The megaphone is in the

foreground. Front and center on the megaphone is an image of Thandiwe Abdullah with their

Instagram handle tagged diagonally over the neck and shoulder of the sticker on the megaphone.

Abdullah has added their own text over the shared image that reads, “When she puts you on her

bullhorn” with a smiley face emoji that Emojipedia.org calls the “pleading face.” While

everyone’s usage of emojis varies, I interpret this choice of emoji as one that is meant to convey

humility, surprise, slight embarrassment, and perhaps an underlying pride, which is why, one can

assume, Abdullah decided to share it. One example of a common theme of posts with or of

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friends, this post represents posts with “selfie/personal” purpose because the share is somewhat

self-celebratory and personal in nature. I categorize this post in the “joyful or loving” mood

because the friend pictured here is smiling and as a reshare, this post signals Abdullah’s

friendship with the person who posted it originally.

In Figure 8, readers can see in tiny white lettering in the upper left corner of the

screenshot that this Story was posted thirteen hours after the story featured in Figure 7 but

looking at the time stamp from my iPhone, we can see I took the screenshot only one minute

later. I draw attention to these time stamps to note the multiple temporalities that co-occur on

Instagram Stories. Abdullah, like many other youth activists on Instagram, tended to post twice a

day on average during the period of this study. For Instagram users who are not constant users,

but check in around once a day, Abdullah’s posts will appear back to back though they were

posted about a half day apart. Instagram users vary widely in their frequency of use of the

platform, but the statistics tend to poll for “daily active users,” which means that users are likely

checking in at least once per day and will experience Abdullah’s content in a daily stream of

continuous content updates. So while one individual fleeting Instagram Stories post may not be

terribly consequential on average, over time, through consistent posting in repeated categories,

purposes, and moods, Abdullah, I contend, is able to make an argument about what peers should

care about and how they should emote.

Figure 9 shows Abdullah resharing with no additional commentary of their own a post

from an Instagram account called @darkest.hue with the words “Colorism, Featurism,

Texturism” in bold black title letters, and “A Breakdown” in smaller white letters underneath.

The words appear in the upper left corner. In the bottom half of the image, there’s an illustration

of a black woman with a large black afro and round rainbow sunglasses. The background is a

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soft butter yellow. This screen shot represents one of Abdullah’s “educational” posts, wherein

she shares posts that explain and educate on a topic related to one of her causes, in this case

structural prejudice that occurs within anti-Black racism.

Figure 10, posted one hour later, shows Abdullah resharing with no additional

commentary of her own a post from People’s Budget LA that reads “FUCK GARCETTI” in

illustrated capital letters. The word “fuck” is illustrated in pink to look like a pig and the word

“Garcetti” is illustrated in red, orange, and yellow flames. The words “Oink oink oink” appear in

fine print at the top and “people’sbudgetla.com” appears in fine print at the bottom. People’s

Budget LA is a coalition led by Black Lives Matter LA that seeks to defund the LA Police

Department and redistribute resources to support the wellbeing of Black communities. This is an

Figure 9 "Colorism, Featurism,

Texturism: A Breakdown"

Figure 10 "Fuck Garcetti"

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example of the “info-sharing” purpose and “angry” mood motif because it links to more

information from People’s Budget LA and is depicted in a visual style meant to convey anger

towards Eric Garcetti, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, whom Abdullah and People’s

Budget LA see as a key figure protecting the racist LAPD. Appearing back to back one hour

after the “Colorism” post, Abdullah communicates to viewers that issues related to anti-Black

racism and racial justice are not monolithic, but rather are complex and intersecting across

demographics, institutions, and racial communities.

Figure 11 shows a post Abdullah shared from another

apparently personal account @ritasfenty that reads, “some of

y’all just need to ask yourselves if you’re an ally or just in

Black people’s business…speaking over us.” Abdullah added

their own text at the top of the image that reads, “reminder”

with two red hearts next to it. This post exemplifies the

“educational” purpose and “lovingly confrontational” mood

motif because it seeks to raise awareness about an issue in

which presumably white people are taking up too much space in

the fight against anti-Black racism and it does so with two

hearts, indicating that Abdullah is expressing this criticism or

confrontation with love. The language in the original post is

confrontational, direct, and challenges non-Black people to self-

reflect on how they are showing up in their activism. Abdullah reposts with heart emojis to

confront their non-Black audiences, but to show that they do so with care.

Figure 11 "Reminder"

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Figure 12 shows Abdullah’s reshare of a slogan-type of graphic Instagram post that reads,

“I’m not ‘pretty for a black girl.’ I’m the shit next to anybody.” The post is from the account

@r29unbothered. The text is pink and purple in all caps against a lighter pink background. The

words “I’m the shit” are emphasized in larger green, magenta, and yellow shadow lettering.

Abdullah has added their own text on top that reads, “We say no to microaggressions in this

family” with a pink heart emoji. This post exemplifies the “lovingly confrontational” mood motif

with an “educational” purpose because Abdullah is amplifying a corrective to a harmful

commonplace, the idea that Black girls are not pretty because they do not conform to white

supremacist beauty standards. Abdullah amplifies this post with the minimal, but meaningful text

that labels this kind of thinking and this kind of commonplace commentary as a microaggression,

and uses “in this family” to indicate, as they do with the photos of friends analyzed in the last

section, that they are not alone in this feeling or view. Their text forwards a rhetoric of

collectivity and solidarity to move the needle on oppressive social norms and commonplaces.

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Abdullah includes a heart emoji to express their message of dissent and protest against anti-

Black racism with love. Figure 12 also reflects another important use of wise anger on

Instagram, that is to speak back to harmful commonplaces.

Figure 13 shows a resource for international students who were at risk of being denied

stay and/or entry into the United States during COVID if they weren’t enrolled in in-person

classes. Abdullah reshared this resource from the account @community_equity_. The resource is

a Google sheet with a list of on-campus classes that international students can request. This is an

example of a “neutral” “info-sharing” post because Abdullah circulates this post without

commentary or any particular emotional

Figure 12 "We say no to

microaggressions in this family"

Figure 13 "Google sheet"

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Figure 14 shows an image I discussed in the “Middle

Fingers Motif” section of this chapter for its use of the middle

finger. This post exemplifies the selfie/personal purpose and

angry mood. Its double use of the middle finger, both in

Abdullah’s embodied gestural rhetoric and in their use of the

middle finger emoji, emphasizes their anger. There is no

depiction of love in this post. Rather this represents Abdullah’s

unapologetic anger about police brutality, signaled by the slogan

“ACAB.” Whereas a post like this if taken out of context might

be more readily interpreted through the “angry Black girl”

stereotype that reduces Black girls’ anger to something irrational

and dangerous, by contextualizing their confrontational anger

and minimal text in the flow of Instagram Stories with helpful information, political education,

and selfies of activism with friends, Abdullah is able to reframe their anger as political, wise, and

in fact loving even if not delivered with heart emojis or smiles.

Figure 14 "Anyways...ACAB"

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Figure 15 shows one of a series of posts in which

Abdullah screen shots an article that discusses how anti-

semitism interracts with racism. In this post, Abdullah has

added their own commentary over the screenshot that reads,

“Re: recent conversations about how anti-Semitism interacts

with anti-Blackness…Ashkenazi Jews in America benefit

from white supremacy via white privilege…of course this is a

nuanced truth, but it is undeniable that white privilege

extends to all people who have been integrated into the

American ‘melting pot’ of the white race…next slide quotes

article by rabbis jessical rosenberg and mackenzie reynolds.”

This post falls into the purpose category of “analysis” and the

mood motif “neutral.”

What I hope to demonstrate by presenting these posts in order of their appearance on

Abdullah’s Stories over the course of a few weeks is a sense of the fluidity of purposes and

moods that Abdullah posts in over time. In my larger archive of Stories posts, I captured 44

different total posts over just a few days between June 17 and July 10. This means that on each

of the days that I screenshotted their Stories posts, Abdullah had published multiple posts of

different purposes and moods. By posting in a range of purposes, most of which are

informational or educational in some way, and by posting in a range of moods of which anger

was only one, Abdullah demonstrates that their anger is informed and is only one emotion, but an

important one, in the range of emotions felt and expressed in the daily life of a young activist

Figure 15 "Ashkenazi Jews"

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Black woman. Beyond a single instance of virality, it is this strategy of continuity and

accumulation, of repetition and variation, to predominantly peer audiences that helps Abdullah’s

anger reclamation efforts have the potential to change cultural norms for their generation.

In the posts categorized in the “anger” mood motif, Abdullah’s anger can’t be considered

an unthinking rage nor, because of its interwovenness with the other moods and purposes, can it

be considered an always-raging kind of anger. Abdullah’s posts in the anger motif demonstrate a

steady, focused, intentional kind of anger, which has its place amongst the range of other healthy

emotions that serve important functions in a human’s life. Abdullah’s anger is one that stems

from understanding the issues, having explanatory frameworks that reveal the deeply rooted

systemic injustice at the heart of these issues. It is an anger that was quietly motivating a

sustained commitment to fighting for justice…until circumstances called for wielding that anger

less quietly. This is not to say it’s always pleasant or palatable to normative audiences. It

challenges norms and in so doing, tests the comfort of those who may not have questioned those

norms and who may not have a feminist or Black feminist analysis of how anger norms are used

to keep women oppressed. Still, strategically using Stories to intertwine documentation of in-the-

streets activism and social movement information alongside angry selfies from their bedroom

and not-so-angry photos of themself with friends, Abdullah reclaims anger as a righteous

emotion, a powerful activist tool, and an ordinary and normal part of a teenage girl’s life.

Further, by interweaving clear expressions of anger with expressions of joy, love, and

emotional neutrality, Abdullah frames their anger within a spectrum of care. Abdullah enfolds

anger into a larger repertoire of posting about social issues with the clear intention to help get

information to those whom it will help and to rectify social ills where they are causing harm.

Because of how much information and analysis there is in the balance of different kinds of posts,

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Abdullah’s anger is also situated within a continuous flow of their informed analysis of social

problems. Abdullah’s anger is thus presented as informed, rational, righteous, and constructive.

It seeks to improve the world, to right wrongs. In the “lovingly confrontational” mood motif, we

can also see that Abdullah’s anger is interlaced with love. It is not the reactive or dangerous rage

that its negative stereotyping implies. It is part of a long Black feminist genealogy of rage

informed by structural injustice and seeking to redress it. By presenting their Black feminist rage

alongside love, joy, friendship, and informed analysis, Abdullah reframes Black girl anger as

wise and constructive through a Black feminist lens for their largely peer audiences. They model

“rage” as eloquent, as that which seeks to rebuild the world as a more loving, more livable place

for more people.

Conclusion

By tacking in to close read the way Abdullah wields anger within a single speech, then

tacking out to look at first their recurring gestural rhetoric of the middle finger and second the

way Abdullah uses Instagram Stories’ “everyday” temporality to combine moods and purposes, I

hope to have shown how Abdullah strategically uses affordances of Instagram Stories to

normalize regular eloquent rage for their audiences. Among the wise angers this dissertation

theorizes, Abdullah uses a specifically Black feminist rhetoric of rage-- an “eloquent rage”-- to

assert a liberatory paradigm to the general public, one rooted in Black feminist principles of love,

embodiment, community, equity, and the situatedness of truth.

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Chapter Three: Shina Novalinga uses

TikTok to Model “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric

Please don’t talk to me ‘bout decolonization

When you still speaking in the colonizers’ language

See you genocide us, then you colonize us

See you sterilized us, and now you fetishize us

—Bobby Sanchez, “Quechua 101 Land Back Please”

Inuk throat singer, activist, and model Shina Novalinga garnered viral celebrity in 2020

and 2021 for TikTok videos she posted of herself performing Inuit throat singing with her

mother Kayuula Novalinga, a professional throat singer and accountant based in Puvirnituq,

Nunavik, Canada. In these videos, the first of which Novalinga posted on April 4, 2020, she and

her mother stand face to face, noses just a few inches apart; they hold on to each other’s arms

and sway side to side as they create rhythm and sound using breath in ways that sound and look

unfamiliar to uninitiated Western audiences. In some of the videos, Novalinga describes the

practice, its cultural significance, and colonizers’ attempts to extinguish it. For example, in

videos with multiple millions of likes, Novalinga describes how Christian priests forbid the

practice, considering it “demonic” (“Proud of our people’s resilience and strength”) and “a sin”

(“We are still here and we are stronger than ever”). In others, she simply documents herself and

her mother singing together, often bursting out into loving laughter together at the end of the

video (see for example, “Kattajaq, throat singing”). Novalinga has often described in her TikTok

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videos and in interviews that throat singing is meant to be playful, soothing, and healing, as it has

long functioned as a game, a way for women to pass time while the men were out hunting, and a

lullaby. Given these historical functions, Novalinga has expressed that she wants to share her

throat singing as widely as possible to help others “heal,” to “soothe their anxiety” and to “have

resilience” (“#healing #suffering #throatsinging #staypositive”). She also emphasizes that it is

important to her to revive and sustain the cultural practice after it was nearly extinguished by

colonizers in the 20th century.

Novalinga’s original use of TikTok as a platform for sharing Inuit throat singing videos,

however, quickly expanded to encompass a wide range of digital activism tactics she uses to

address the colonial history of violence against Indigenous communities like hers, as well as

present-day issues Indigenous communities face because of ongoing settler colonial harm. Some

of her most covered topics include missing and murdered Indigenous women and two-spirit

persons, residential schools, the land back movement, and Inuit cuisine and sustainable hunting

customs vs. Western “animal rights” activism, several of which I will discuss later in the chapter.

As she says in an interview for Vogue Magazine in November 2020, “I originally started TikTok

for fun, but it evolved when I started spreading awareness about my Indigenous culture”

(Allaire). Novalinga now has roughly as many TikTok videos that don’t include throat-singing as

those that do. Though Novalinga uses a diverse range of rhetorical strategies, she most

commonly creates content that appeals to beauty, education, humor, and wise anger to spread

awareness about Inuit culture and protest against ongoing racist, colonial harm.

In this chapter, I analyze a selection of Novalinga’s videos that evidence their anger and

demonstrate what I’m calling “angry Inuk” rhetoric, drawing from Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s

documentary of the same name and from Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, a book in which editors Joe

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Karatek, Frank Tester, and Shirley Takalik gather and publish Inuit elders’ words that attempt to

encapsulate the Inuit epistemology. First, I offer some background on Novalinga and her

sociopolitical context, then I analyze TikTok as a platform for Novalinga’s activism. Next, I

discuss my methods and methodology for defining “angry Inuk” rhetoric as the third kind of

“wise anger” this dissertation theorizes. Finally, I present my body of case studies within

Novalinga’s larger body of TikTok videos, offering context on each of the issues the videos

respond to. Across Novalinga’s videos, as my analysis shows, Novalinga toggles between

addressing individual and structural anti-Indigenous racism. Somewhat similarly to Thandiwe

Abdullah in chapter two, Novalinga weaves her anger through a variety of rhetorical strategies

that include humor, education, and personal story-telling to compel audiences to see present day

issues from her Inuit perspective. Ultimately, Novalinga’s angry Inuk rhetoric draws diverse

global audiences into feeling angry with her about the ongoing legacy of settler colonial harm

against Inuit and other Indigenous peoples.

Novalinga and Settler Colonial and Indigenous Relations

Born in 1998, Shina Novalinga was raised by her mother in Montreal, Quebec. She was

22 when I started following her on TikTok, both in the literal sense of being her TikTok follower

but also in the Sara Ahmed sense of “following around” or maintaining an active personal and

scholarly interest in and investigating the origins, use, and activity of a word, concept, figure, or

trend (see The Promise of Happiness). Novalinga studied business management at John Abbott

College, one of eight English public colleges in Quebec. She graduated in the spring of 2021 and

started a program in Inuit Studies at Nunavik Sivunitsavut in Montreal that fall (Kunze). This

was also when she garnered international celebrity on TikTok for throat singing. As a result of

her viral celebrity and self-produced visibility as an Indigenous creator, she has been featured in

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a variety of mainstream magazines (Vogue, Elle, Teen Vogue). Most of her early coverage

focused on her success using social media to celebrate her culture and bring Inuit throat singing

to global audiences.

What has received less coverage is Novalinga’s use of TikTok to speak back against the

settler colonial history of violence against Indigenous communities like hers, as well as to raise

awareness about present-day issues Indigenous communities face because of ongoing settler

colonialist harm. As Meghan Leinhauser points out, referring to the United States [or Canada] as

a “colonialist settler-state” is not an accusation, but instead a historical reality (Dunbar-Ortiz

2014 as qtd on Leinhauser 5). “Truth be told,” Leinhauser writes, “the existence of the United

States [and Canada] is the direct result of looting an entire continent and its resources, with the

ultimate goal of terminating Indigenous peoples’ existence” (5). Leinhauser must establish the

“truth”-fulness of this claim (as she indicates in the introductory clause, “truth be told”) precisely

because of the presiding refusal to tell this history accurately. Scholars have documented how

social studies textbooks in the United States and Canada depict Indigenous peoples as “ignorant”

or “noble” “savages,” “white man’s helper,” “Indian maiden,” and “heroic chiefs” (Garcia) or as

pitiable “victims” who have not contributed to contemporary society (Journell). Joshua Ward

Jeffery notes that Native people often lack any representation whatsoever after the 1890s, as if

they either ceased to exist or as if settler colonialism ended before the turn of the 20th century.

As recently as October 2017, problematic representations of settler colonial-Indigenous

relations circulated virally on social media. In the images, which were photographed from a

Canadian elementary school workbook, the First Nations peoples are described as having

“agreed to move to different areas to make room for the new settlements.” This is a grossly

euphemistic reframing of what actually happened: they were forcibly removed from their

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ancestral lands by settler colonialists against their will and any treaties they made were often not

honored by the colonial settlers. Next to this false description there is a small illustrated image of

a smiling Indigenous person shaking hands with a smiling white man in a cowboy hat, as if to

underscore that the exchange was largely amicable. It was not, as Novalinga demonstrates later

in this chapter. The same textbook continues: “The First Nations peoples moved to areas called

reserves, where they could live undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of the settlers” (Palma,

emphasis added). Narrating this violent, tragic history as one in which First Nations people

moved of their own volition, were able to live “undisturbed” by settlers, and sought merely to

avoid the settlers’ “hustle and bustle” is a blatant exercise in propaganda in the face of credible

accounts of this history, which document abhorrent systematic violence by the settlers against the

Indigenous peoples.

Relations between Indigenous and white-dominant settler colonial descendants in Canada

are far from healed. Disrupting these stereotyping and harmfully euphemistic narratives about

Indigenous people and settler colonial history, Novalinga uses TikTok to tell more accurate

stories about several historical and present issues related to colonial-Indigenous relations. In the

sections that follow I provide background on each topic and analyze one example of Novalinga’s

related posts, but first, I will discuss why TikTok is a strategic choice of platform for

Novalinga’s aims.

One Form of TikTok Activism: Reclaiming Control of the Narrative

TikTok is a short form video-based platform that enables anyone with a camera phone to

record, edit, add sound and text, and share video content that is between 15 and 60 seconds long.

Many users simply use the app to watch videos without contributing their own. The app has been

largely used for entertainment and comedy, has helped enable the rise of “influencer culture,”

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and is increasingly used to advertise and sell products (D’Souza). In 2022, the app is available in

over 150 countries and has 8.3 million active users in Canada (Yuen) and 94.1 million users in

the United States (Ceci). TikTok was started by the Chinese startup company called Douyin, or

ByteDance and is owned in part by the Chinese government. The United States has recently

considered banning the app due to security concerns, e.g. that the Chinese government could be

collecting sensitive military data via military members’ personal devices (Wishart-Smith). Like

most free social networking apps, TikTok collects an enormous amount of data about its users

and is not transparent with users about how their data is used.

Because of its ease of use and ease of finding users with shared interests, however,

TikTok can be a powerful digital communication medium for individuals from marginalized

groups to self-author content and put non-dominant self-representation into mainstream publics’

view. TikTok content creators from marginalized backgrounds can use TikTok to disrupt

harmful controlling narratives and assert their own. In “Girls Who Like Girls: Using Affordances

for Queer Activism on TikTok,” for example, Yael Cohen shows how queer women on TikTok

use the platform to fight against sexual objectification by employing three strategies of queer

activism: calling out problematic phenomena and behavior, connecting with community to create

queer spaces, and producing representation through self-expression. Cohen notes that there are

two particular affordances of TikTok that make it a powerful platform for activism: easy content

creation and direct interaction (11). For a queer community which has long been harmfully

misrepresented, TikTok affords queer users the ability to self-represent, which means, as Cohen

puts it, they are “producing representation through self-expression” (18). TikTok, in other words,

affords historically marginalized individuals the means to produce representation in their image

and according to their vision and authorship. This means of self-representation enables TikTok

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content creators the ability to disrupt dominant representations of marginalized communities that

perpetuate stereotypes and stigmatization, which leads to the unjust distribution of resources and

systematic mistreatment.

What Novalinga does on TikTok is similar to the queer women content creators that

Cohen analyzes. Because Novalinga can author, produce, and publish videos with little need for

additional resources beyond a cell phone and access to the internet, Novalinga “produces

representation through self-expression” that disrupts the long history of harmful erasure and

misrepresentation by dominant settler colonial culture. As she has reported in interviews, this

process has also helped her become more self-confident in her Inuk identity. Scholars and

activists have studied how degrading, disrespectful representation affects the individuals it

claims to represent. In “‘We Don’t Kiss Like That’: Inuit Women Respond to Music Video

Representations,” for example, Cassidy Glennie discusses the ways that Western media

producers commit symbolic violence (Bourdieu) through representation that sexualizes Inuit

women and reduces them to simple stereotypes like the “Indian princess.” “Media influence is

problematic,” Glennie writes, “not because it has public influence but that it continues to

disseminate the normalization of master narratives” (107). Glennie’s article shares the firsthand

testimony of Inuit women who describe how the controlling stereotypes that dominate Western

videos and TV shows harm their self-confidence and enable structural anti-Inuit racism to persist

over time. Through TikTok, Novalinga disrupts and protests the normalization of master

narratives by authoring self-representation as an Inuk woman and linking her representation to

the larger Inuit culture. In the analysis of a representative collection of Novalinga’s TikTok

videos that follows in this chapter, I show how Novalinga cleverly exploits TikTok affordances

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to speak back against harmful master narratives and self-publish self-authored videos that tell

wisely angry truer stories about Novalinga and Inuit culture.

Though Novalinga has over 4 million followers at the time of this writing in May 2022,

Novalinga strategically exploits the affordances of TikTok “trends” to increase the circulation of

her self-authored Inuit representation. Trends are patterns of use that TikTokers participate in.

They function in multiple ways on the TikTok platform: there are what I would call thematic

trends, sound trends, and hashtags. Thematic trends function similarly to a genre in traditional

rhetorical terms in that each trend comes into existence in response to a specific exigency and

uses a distinctive form that then gets coopted by other users in other contexts who repeat and

vary the form to respond to the same or different exigency. Thematic trends vary in form and

format—sometimes they operate through a type of activity or story, sometimes through a key

phrase or scenario, sometimes through a style of editing. Trends function like memes in that their

meaning and form morph as their usage expands, there’s a kind of cultural capital to be gained

by producing an innovative variation on the theme, and regular TikTok users are often familiar

with the most popular trends and their evolution over time. An example of a thematic trend is a

beauty regimen whereby typically young women record and edit a video of themselves going

through their morning beauty routine and showing off the products. There are specific hand

gestures that have come to be associated with this trend so that performing the expected hand

gestures demonstrates that you are a kind of digital insider to the trend, like you are “in” on the

joke or the trend. Content creators gain likes, shares, and cultural capital by executing a trend in

an innovative, funny, or otherwise pleasing way, or sometimes just because they are well liked.

Novalinga commonly creates content that takes up a popular trend and adds an Inuit “spin.” In so

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doing, she adds self-authored Inuit representation to the trending content that TikTok users are

likely to see.

Novalinga also uses TikTok’s “sound” feature to expand the circulation of her content.

TikTok’s “sound” feature enables users to use the “sound” or audio clip of any other video on

the platform. Every sound hyperlinks to a collection of all videos that have used the sound, so it

functions in a networked fashion similarly to a hashtag but through the aural medium and

through the feature of sound. By strategically participating in current TikTok trends through the

use of trending sounds, Novalinga is able to insert Inuit representation on the platform, which

currently has over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide (TikTok Statistics).

Novalinga also increases the reach of her content well beyond her 4 million followers

through strategic hashtag use. Hashtags function on TikTik as they do on other social media

platforms: clicking on a hashtag in the caption of a post brings the user to a collection of other

posts that have used the same hashtag. This is an efficient way to increase the circulation of

one’s post as anyone can add any hashtag to their post title to have the post link with other posts

attached to the same hashtag. Hashtags also function semantically to convey key themes and

even make implicit arguments. For example, across almost all of her videos, Novalinga combines

the hashtags #Inuit and #Indigenous with #culture and the more specific hashtags related to the

particular video; I read this choice to include the #Inuit and #Indigenous hashtags across content

as evidence that one of her central aims is to contribute self-authored Inuit and Indigenous

representation to the immense global flow of TikTok content, in addition to generally increasing

the circulation of her posts and underscoring in each post that it intends to represent Inuit and

Indigenous parts of Novalinga’s identity. Using these hashtags, she makes an argument about

what Inuit and Indigenous culture is, who it is, and who should get to represent it. Novalinga also

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sometimes uses the #NativeTikTok hashtag to join and amplify the global conversation about

Indigenous and Inuit peoples that TikTok users have created, as she has described in interviews

how much she enjoys the ways that TikTok has enabled her to build community with other

Indigenous creators (Nash).

Moreover, her participation in these larger trends demonstrate that she is not a single,

individual using TikTok in these ways, but rather she is part of a fluid cohort of Indigenous and

Inuit TikTok participants who use the platform to build community and raise awareness. In an

interview with Vogue in November 2020, Novalinga explains why she feels compelled to use

TikTok to educate others:

It's important for me to educate others on my platform because not a lot of people

know about our history, or know about the Inuit culture. It has always been

brushed off. My goal is to change that and not be afraid to speak about it. (Allaire)

In this quote, Novalinga’s language reveals the courage her TikTok posting requires. She is

actively working against the fear that dominant culture instills in girls against speaking out. She

also explicitly states that a primary goal of her use of TikTok is to increase accurate

representation of Inuit people and educate non-Indigenous people about Inuit culture.

TikTok is known as the platform that can most easily lead to “going viral,” or having

one’s post become extremely popular in a very short period of time. Virality is afforded

primarily by TikTok’s proprietary “For You” content recommendation algorithm, which it uses

to push content to individual users’ “For You” page. The “For You” page is the home page of the

app and circulates content from public accounts into users’ view based on a proprietary

algorithm. In a June 18, 2020 press release TikTok published information for the first time about

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its proprietary algorithm (TikTok), revealing that the algorithm favors “diversifying

recommendations,” rather than only showing you what you’ve demonstrated you like. This is

ostensibly how they describe their motivation to spread perhaps unexpected content widely,

causing virality. Under the header of “diversifying recommendations,” the press release

explains:

By offering different videos from time to time, the system is also able to get a

better sense of what's popular among a wider range of audiences to help provide

other TikTok users a great experience, too. Our goal is to find balance between

suggesting content that's relevant to you while also helping you find content and

creators that encourage you to explore experiences you might not otherwise see.

In other words, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm will allow trending videos to appear in

users’ feeds somewhat regardless of the user’s previously exhibited interests purportedly to

“diversify” users’ feeds. This means the “filter bubble” effect is reduced on TikTok compared

with other platforms. The “filter bubble” names the way that algorithms narrow what an

individual user sees based on their demonstrated preferences and past behavior so that they are

unlikely to encounter content that they dislike or disagree with, which has proven potentially

catastrophic for democracy around the world (see Eli Pariser, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Cathy

O’Neil, and others). Novalinga’s videos often have over 100 million views, a result of her clever

exploitation of TikTok’s design.

In sum, by participating in video trends and linking her videos to others through audio

clips and hashtags, Novalinga uses affordances of TikTok strategically to diversify Indigenous

representation in the steady stream of video content published on TikTok, to educate global

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publics on Inuit culture and colonial history, and, as I argue in this chapter, to model angry Inuk

rhetoric for vast global audiences, the third of this dissertation’s three forms of wise anger

modeled by youth activists online.

Defining “Anger” in “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric

As all angers are, Novalinga’s anger is mediated through her own cultures and will be

interpreted through the cultural frames of those perceiving it. Seen through Western patriarchy’s

definition of anger, anger is usually only visible insofar as it appears fierce, loud, aggressive,

charged, and/or fiery (Chemaly, Traister). To Western audiences, Novalinga’s anger, which is

often expressed more subtly through unsmiling facial gestures, a calm demeanor, and sometimes

humor, will likely appear much softer, gentler, and more accommodating. It may not even read

immediately as anger. In this chapter, I assert that Western publics’ framework for understanding

anger (our “anger literacy,” I might say) must expand to be able to discern that not all angers are

created equal nor should all angers be treated the same.

Western patriarchal scripts train participants to see softness, gentleness, and an

accommodating nature as feminine qualities; these same scripts train subjects to see what is

feminine as weak, not powerful and not rational. In short, to appear feminine is to appear less

credible and less trustworthy as a rhetor. As both Quebecois and Inuk, Novalinga’s speech acts

on TikTok should be read through both frames, both of which encourage gentleness and

discourage anger, though in different ways, which I will discuss in more depth shortly. As

described in this dissertation’s introduction, this entire project defines or qualifies as angry any

expression of dissent by a young woman that can be reasonably read to challenge or defy

oppressive anger norms. As in other chapters, I have drawn upon culturally specific texts to help

inform my lens on what constitutes Novalinga’s anger. Considering Novalinga’s mixed Western,

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Indigenous, and Inuk audiences on TikTok, I believe Novalinga’s subtle anger reflects her

embodiment of Inuk-specific anger norms, but also her strategic navigation of minimal leeway

young women in both Inuit and Western cultures are given to be angry in public speech. By

strategically navigating her cultural anger norms to express dissent and protest injustice on

TikTok, I identify in Novalinga’s digital rhetorical strategy a clever deployment of a Quebecois

and Inuk-specific “wise anger,” in that, as with the rhetors discussed across this dissertation, it is

justified, informed, thoughtful, reflective, responsive, reasoning, and constructive.

I draw my theorization of wise “angry Inuk” rhetoric in part from Arnaquq-Baril’s

documentary, titled Angry Inuk (2016). In the film, Arnaquq-Baril depicts Indigenous activists’

efforts to persuade Western diplomats and environmental policy makers of the ethics and

sustainability of the Inuit seal hunt and of the seal hunt’s importance to Inuit people’s culture and

livelihood. The documentary presents an Inuit counterargument to Western animal rights’

activists’ well-funded, ethnocentric attempts to ban the Inuit practice, attempts which have

undermined Inuits’ ability to compete in the global marketplace and created systemic poverty

and food insecurity. Arnaquq-Baril titles the film Angry Inuk to underscore the central tension

the film explores: “How does a culture with an understated anger fight against a group that’s

infamous for the exact opposite?” (00:13:51). The “anger” of the titular figurative “angry Inuk”

is, as Arnaquq-Baril describes, “too quiet and soft to get anyone’s attention” (01:05:00). As

Arnaquq-Baril shows, Inuk cultural norms prize humor and harmony-seeking over anger and

aggression. This means that men and women alike are socialized not to express overt criticism or

engage in angry protest. That is not how Inuit people seek to make change, but it doesn’t mean

they’re not angry or not paying attention, as Western activist rhetoric implies. Arnaquq-Baril’s

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documentary helps elucidate for Western audiences an understanding of Inuk anger that is as

quiet and subtle as it is angry.

My theory of angry Inuk rhetoric also draws from a book called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,

which compiles and shares long-standing “traditional” Inuit knowledge with present and future

Inuit people as well as respectful outsiders. In Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, anger is described as a

negative consequence of--rather than a cause of--conflict within the community. Since there are

specific, peaceful, often humor-inflected ways of seeking harmony as part of the maligarjuat or

“guideposts for life” (9), conflict is usually able to be resolved before there is a need for anger.

This is because of the core Inuit value for communal well-being and harmony amongst everyone

in the community. “For Inuit,” the elders write, “a good life meant living well in communities,”

which requires having effective means of “working together to deal with threats to social

harmony and balance,” a process and “critical survival tool” they call aajiiqatigiingniq6 (10-11).

What struck me as a White Western-socialized person while reading about

aajiiqatigiingniq is the idea that when working together to find a solution is a core value, there’s

less reason or cause for anger because those who seek a change know they will be heard. They

6 In this framework, conflict is addressed and resolved promptly, before anger can foment. “The process

was not employed lightly,” Rhoda Karetak writes in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, continuing:

Negative habits or behaviours were always quickly and strongly confronted as soon as they were noticed. If

a person did not change their behaviour, then community caregivers—usually Elders and people significant

to the person doing wrong—would gather to set a plan in motion to correct the wrongdoing. We used to

bring the people to account and we helped them to understand the consequences of their behaviours for

everyone. As well, there was support provided for the person to correct the behaviour. Each person in the

aajiqatigiingniq process had a role to play in supporting the individual to improve. Aajiqatigiingniq was

intended as a process to restore the individual to well-being and to being a productive, caring member of

the community. (11-12)

I quote this passage at length because it illustrates the relationship between anger and social healing and harmony

that this project is implicitly and explicitly invested in. I would love to see further research explore how Western

culture might learn from aajiiqatigiingniq to design processes in a Western context that can foster working together

to achieve accountability and healing so that we can coexist more richly in community with each other.

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can trust that the community will come together to address the issue, so anger has less of a place.

By contrast, as established in the dissertation’s introduction, Western feminists’ long struggle to

liberate women’s anger and include it as a respected emotion for women stems precisely from

the fact that the larger society is more interested in silencing and oppressing women than in

hearing their grievances, criticisms, and needs. In inequitable cultures that don’t listen to those

who suffer, anger has long been an important emotion in advocating for oneself or community,

for redressing wrong, and for manifesting change within unequal systems of power. Indeed, as

the elders remark in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, “much of the conflict in Western society is the

result of inequalities” (13).

Colonizers’ violent disruption of the Inuit way of life introduced an external conflict that

exceeded the Inuit system’s ability to reconcile it (because Western colonizers were not

interested in resolving that conflict). Rather, settler colonialists sought to extinguish Inuit culture.

Part of why anger is so necessary today across Western cultures is that interconnected issues are

reaching a breaking point and continue to be ignored, destroying hope and igniting collective

fury. In this situation, anger is an appropriate emotional response. It functions as a rhetorical

resource to identify and draw allies in the fight for justice, reconciliation, and harmony. So while

Inuit culture may indeed eschew or disfavor anger, it is not, in principle, out of an attempt to

silence those who have been wronged, unlike in Western culture. Rather, anger reflects that there

has been a conflict that needs resolving. Taken altogether, these sources on Inuit anger suggest

that we respect the gravity of Novalinga’s anger expressions on TikTok, despite how subtle or

soft they may seem to Western audiences. Novalinga describes herself as half-Inuk, half-

Quebecois. Considering the combined effects of an Inuk cultural imperative to eschew anger and

a Western Quebecois imperative for girls to smile and be accommodating, I read Novalinga’s

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public refusals to smile on TikTok and willingness to speak back against structural and personal

harm as key features of an “angry Inuk” version of wise anger expressed on TikTok.

Like Thandiwe Abdullah in the previous dissertation chapter, Novalinga weaves her

anger rhetoric into a larger corpus of content that moves deftly and regularly across the

emotional spectrum; her anger expressions are interwoven with expressions of joy, hope, humor,

sadness, gratitude, pride, and more, to show that anger is just one of many appropriate emotions

in the daily life of a young Inuk-Quebecois woman. Similar to Thandiwe Abdullah’s posting

strategy on Instagram discussed in the previous chapter, Novalinga’s strategy shows viewers on

TikTok and beyond that sometimes, despite dominant cultural messaging to the contrary, anger

is the appropriate response for marginalized young women and non-binary people.

Analysis: Novalinga’s “Angry Inuk” Rhetoric on TikTok

Across Novalinga’s TikToks, I read patterns in her self-authored content on TikTok that I

classify as angry Inuk rhetoric. Some key features include: the alternate use of “unsmiling” facial

rhetoric and direct eye contact with frequent smiles, captions and text that disrupt harmful

stereotypes and misinformation, video footage that uses close-ups and extreme close-ups of

herself to create intimacy, and TikTok sounds that present dissenting messages aurally. In the

sections that follow, I will provide background on several of the Inuit and Indigenous-related

issues Novalinga’s TikToks take up and analyze videos in each category that demonstrate the

angry Inuk rhetoric Novalinga uses to persuade non-Indigenous audiences to respect Inuit culture

and take action to counteract settler colonial harm.

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Foodways

Since posting her first throat singing TikTok video on April 14, 2020, Novalinga has

posted 183 total videos at the time of this writing on March 6, 2023. By her fourth video on July

18, 2020, Novalinga started to diversify her content to include what I would classify as

characteristically angry Inuk rhetoric in a post about Inuit cuisine that foregrounds cultural pride

while educating audiences about the structural issue of food scarcity. As Arnaquq-Baril’s

documentary reveals, Inuit people face food scarcity and economic depression because of

Westerners’ attempts to ban the Inuit seal hunt. These attempts have included using misleading

narratives that paint seals as cute and vulnerable and Inuit as savage. Novalinga’s video is titled,

“We need to spread awareness about our traditional food󲟄󲟅󲟆 #indigenous #inuit #culture

#nunavik #traditionalfood.” Through a combination of educational captions, intimate footage of

close-up shots of her and her mom eating in their dining room, and the gestural rhetoric of

unapologetic joy, Novalinga uses TikTok to reframe Inuit cultural practice on Inuit terms and

contradict how ignorant Westerners have tainted its image. Perhaps ironically, I read Novalinga’s

gestures of joy combined with the emphatic captions as an expression of angry Inuk rhetoric

because of how they use TikTok’s visual platform to stage a subtle yet powerful defiance of anti-

Inuit racist messaging.

In the video, Novalinga and her mother appear in amateur-ish handheld video footage in

what appears to be their dining room, smiling and eating the “traditional food” her title

references. Novalinga uses overlaid text captions to teach non-Inuit audiences the Inuit names for

this traditional food: she identifies one of the foods as “mattak” or beluga whale and another as

“nikkuk” or dried caribou. She also identifies that the traditional Inuit knife they use to cut off

bites is an “ulu.” In intimate, close-up selfie video footage, Novalinga and her mom dip the

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mattak and nikkuk into a dark brown sauce and eat with their hands to much apparent pleasure.

In one of the frames, Novalinga overlays a caption that reads, “The animals lived a happy natural

life, we do not waste any part of the animal,” which contradicts Western messaging about Inuit

cuisine as harmful and wasteful of precious animal life. Another frame later in the video includes

a caption that reads, “We need to STOP the stereotypes of this being ‘cruel’ or ‘inhumane’. This

is the best way to hunt food <3 my grandparents were white washed. This is RECENT tradition.”

Novalinga uses a variety of TikTok’s affordances in this video to angrily reject harmful

racist stereotypes and recontextualize Inuit practices through her own frame. In her caption, “We

need to STOP the stereotypes of this being ‘cruel’ or ‘inhumane’. This is the best way to hunt

food <3 my grandparents were white washed. This is RECENT tradition,” Novalinga explicitly

calls out racist stereotypes that depict Inuit dietary practices are “cruel” and “inhumane,” and

uses the antiracist term “white wash” to emphasize the structural, racialized nature of the harm.

Novalinga uses capital letters to visually emphasize her call to action to “STOP” the harmful

stereotypes and understand that this practice is contemporary, not a relic of a “less civilized” past

as the Westerners’ stereotypes imply. Novalinga regularly uses capital letters to emphasize her

arguments visually and convey the wise anger behind them as I show in the following analyses.

Novalinga also uses a heart emoji here and in other examples in what I read as a gendered

rhetorical choice to “soften” the message and mitigate the rejection that a young woman’s more

overt anger expression tends to elicit. As Novalinga smiles and wags her head from side to side

while eating the whale and caribou, she uses a tactic she repeats in other videos: using gestural

rhetoric to envelop her anger in joy and pride so that it is more likely interpreted as reasonable

and sympathetic, to counter sexist and ageist stereotypes that suggest otherwise.

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MMIWG2S

“Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit,” commonly

abbreviated as MMIWG2S, refers to a grassroots social movement that seeks to address the

epidemic of missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit persons, a systemic problem that

mainstream media and the Canadian and United States governments have largely neglected

(“MMIWG2S”). The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

in 2016 found that Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or to go

missing than members of any other demographic group in Canada (Tasker). The Centers for

Disease Control’s 2018 report shows that murder is the third leading cause of death for

Indigenous women (Leinhauser 4). Organizers frame the epidemic as a product of the colonial

legacy of sexualizing and genociding First Nations, Inuit and Metis women, girls, and gender

diverse people. The 2021 National Action Plan involves “support services for survivors and

family members; creating an oversight body; public awareness and training, all with continued

involvement of families and survivors” (Moss and Moss), but some organizers call for more. The

Native Women’s Association of Canada demand that the epidemic be understood as an ongoing

genocide and taught in secondary schools (NWAC action plan). In Canada and the United States,

May 5 has been named the “National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous

Women and Girls.” As Leinhauser shows, TikTok is an effective platform to raise awareness

about this and other issues that are under-represented in mainstream media (3) and Novalinga

does just that.

In a video Novalinga posts on April 8, 2021, a little less than a month ahead of the

national day of awareness, she uses angry Inuk rhetoric to raise awareness about the issue and

broadcast her dissent. In the video, she appears standing directly in front of the camera, with a

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serious, unsmiling expression on her face. She wears a red dress, which has become the symbol

of the movement thanks to an art installation by Metis artist Jaime Black. Novalinga’s mother

stands at Novalinga’s side, facing Novalinga, first brushing and then braiding Novalinga’s hair

while Novalinga alternately looks into the camera and closes her eyes. Both Novalinga and her

mom lip sync to the sound, “Fawn Wood Remember Me,” posted by TikTok user @Wabinah.

This is an example of the sound “theme” I described earlier where any TikTok user can use the

sound file to connect their video to others using the same sound. The video has 12.8 million

views, 3.1 million likes, and over 34 thousand shares as of March 2023.

Throughout the 31-second video, Novalinga uses two subtle, but powerful non-verbal

facial gestures of dissent to communicate her wise anger: not smiling and closing her eyes. The

unsmiling facial gesture is a common rhetorical tactic used across this dissertation’s wise angers.

For girls and women who have been at least somewhat enculturated within Western cultural

norms that demand of them a constant state of kindness and warmth, not smiling while making

direct eye contact reads as a gesture of gendered defiance. Though Novalinga’s choice to not

smile can be read as congruent with Inuit cultural norms to not smile in photographs, given the

dominance of smiling videos in Novalinga’s larger repertoire, I believe it is reasonable to

interpret her choice as defiant through the counter-Western frame, especially given her intention

to reach Western audiences on this particular issue.

By closing her eyes regularly throughout the video, Novalinga shuts viewers out in a

symbolic gesture with multiple meanings. On the one hand, Novalinga closing her eyes at

various points throughout the video signals respect for those who have been murdered and gone

missing and challenges viewers to turn inward and reflect. Closed eyes can reflect taking a

pause, or a moment of silence, to honor those who have passed, especially given the video’s title,

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“In honour of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.” By closing her eyes in a

video that centers on herself, Novalinga also defies the convention of the video selfie to appear

to make eye contact with viewers. Instead, Novalinga refuses the connection offered by this

apparent eye contact. By defying the gender norms that demand her to accommodate others’

feelings over her own, Novalinga demonstrates her subtle, but poignant angry Inuk rhetoric. She

argues through embodied rhetoric that the issue of MMIW2S justifies her anger and deserves

publics’ care, attention, and action.

The Residential School System and the #LandBack Movement

Through the chronological juxtaposition, or interweaving, of videos responding to

different causes and histories, Novalinga implies their interconnectedness. One history

Novalinga connects to the issue of MMIWG2S is the history of the Canadian residential school

system. Like the MMIWG2S issue, the systematic horrors of this history have been largely left

out of school textbooks, making it a strategic topic for Novalinga to shed light on using TikTok.

The Canadian Residential School system started in 1876 with the passage of the Indian

Act and lasted until the last school was closed in 1997. In this system, the Canadian government

removed at least 150,000 Indigenous youth from their homes and forced them to attend colonial

boarding schools where they were assimilated into settler colonial Canadian culture (Luo).

Settler colonists prohibited Indigenous cultural practices in an attempt to extinguish Indigenous

cultures and fully take possession of Indigenous ancestral homelands. Examples of prohibited

cultural practices include the throat singing Novalinga and her mother use TikTok to recover and

the practice of tunniit, or Inuit facial tattooing, that I discuss in the next section. At the residential

schools, parental visits were disincentivized through a variety of means to facilitate the youth’s

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colonial cultural indoctrination and disrupt the perpetuation of Indigenous culture. Many of the

youth were subject to physical and sexual abuse (Curry and Howlett, “Natives died in droves as

Ottawa ignored warnings”) and were never returned to their families.

Novalinga has posted many videos related to the residential school system explicitly, and

puts on display her anger rhetoric, though in some ways all of her content is an act of resistance

against harms caused by this system. In one video titled, “I am the second generation in my

family that didn’t attend a residential school #landback #indigenous #inuit #residentialschool,”

Novalinga makes the historical issue personal and gives it present relevance by sharing in the

title that she is the second generation in her family to not attend a residential school. In the video,

Novalinga appears with a straight-on stare that is characteristic of her angry Inuk rhetoric in that

it communicates seriousness and a gendered refusal to accommodate viewers. The video cuts to

black and white photography of Indigenous people at the residential schools. Each photo appears

for a few seconds and documents various harms committed at the schools, including Inuit

people’s hair being chopped off by white people in religious attire, Inuit people dressed in

colonial garments, and more. The video uses Bobby Sanchez’ sound, “Quechua 101 Land Back

Please.” This choice of sound, which connects hers to other videos made with this popular audio

clip, helps the video circulate and suggests a possible path for reconciliation in the #LandBack

movement.

To seek reparations for Indigenous peoples and the land, the “Land Back” movement,

which uses the #LandBack hashtag, has emerged as an intersectional movement for justice led by

Indigenous peoples working to address the theft of Indigenous lands and their destruction

through settler colonial resource extraction. As the Land Back website (landback.org) describes,

the term “land back” signifies a campaign for justice and a “political framework that allows us to

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deepen our relationships across the field of organizing movements working towards true

collective liberation.” Many of Novalinga’s activist content participates in “land back” activism

by using Bobby Sanchez’ audio, which she uses in multiple videos, through the #LandBack

hashtag, and by connecting the land back movement to truth-telling about the colonial history of

land theft.

Connecting all of her causes in the interest of Indigenous sovereignty, Novalinga has

posted multiple videos that advocate “canceling Canada Day,” the official government holiday to

celebrate Canada’s independence as a nation. In one video posted on 5/19/2021, she reenacts a

dialogue between herself and presumably a non-Indigenous or white Canadian person. In this

dialogue, the white person (played by her) invites the Indigenous person to “come celebrate

Canada day.” When the Indigenous person says, “no,” the white person says, “Why? You should

be proud!” The video closes with Novalinga wearing orange, unsmiling, and saying “wear

orange for our children,” which symbolizes solidarity with families who lost children in the

residential school system (Michie).

In another example within this activist theme, Novalinga combines humor and

exaggerated, acted-out anger to speak back against settler colonial land theft and attempts to

exterminate Indigenous cultures. In the video titled, “It’s enough slices!” from 5/19/21,

Novalinga uses a popular TikTok trend to express angry resistance at the Canadian

commonplace that Indigenous people should be grateful for what the Canadian government has

given them. The trend consists of a voiceover of someone giving someone else slices of pizza to

the point of excess and not listening when the person says, “thank you, that’s enough.” In

Novalinga’s version, she appears onscreen, lipsyncing what the voiceover is saying while text

appears over her face to list the things that the Canadian government “gave” to Indigenous

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people, like French and English language education, religion, etc. At the end of the video,

Novalinga yells, “It’s enough slices!!!” and the video closes on her unsmiling face. By acting out

anger through a voiceover whose very exaggeration implies humor, Novalinga bypasses

oppressive norms. As others in this dissertation have done, Novalinga uses humor to express

anger through irony online. Furthermore, by miming her anger, she takes protective cover behind

the presumable white, male person whose angry voice we hear, a voice global audiences have

been trained to hear as reasonable in their anger. Lip syncing to someone else’s angry speech

about something as apolitical as pizza, Novalinga undermines the well-trod sexist, ageist, racist

stereotyping of a young Indigenous activist woman’s anger as ridiculous.

Tunniit

Novalinga uses TikTok to self-author her story of getting “tunniit,” the traditional Inuit

tattoo, a practice that was nearly extinguished by colonizers. Though Novalinga’s posts start out

expressing only joy and pride at Novalinga’s decision to get the tunniit, the narrative shifts over

the course of her posts to respond to the racism she encounters as a result of getting the tunniit.

This section examines the different ways Novalinga uses TikTok to speak back to the micro and

macroaggressions waged against her tunniit and the larger tunniit practice.

“Tunniit” refers to an individual Inuit woman’s tattoo in the longstanding cultural

practice among Inuit women called “kakiniq” or “kakiniit.” In this extant ancient practice,

women tattoo women with permanent ink, usually on the face and wrist and sometimes thighs.

Inuit cultural protector and changemaker Angela Hovak Johnston basically saved the kakiniit

practice from the brink of extinction. As she describes in her book, Reawakening our Ancestors’

Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing (2017), the last known Inuit woman with the

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traditional tattoo died in 2005. Johnston was determined not to let the practice become “just

another part of history that we only read about in books” (3), so she took it upon herself to learn

the art of kakiniit. She founded the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project to educate Inuit women

about the traditional practice and its history and to provide tattooing to Inuit women who wanted

to reclaim the practice. As part of the project, dozens of women got tattooed and shared what

they knew about the historic cultural practice7. Inuit photographer Cora DeVos photographed the

project and two other tattoo artists with Indigenous roots helped do the tattooing. Elder Alice

Hitkoak Ayalik shared other cultural knowledge with the group as part of the project and there

was a community feast and celebration “to involve the whole community in welcoming the

women with their new tattoos” (16). Johnston’s project went far beyond simply tattooing the

women. She gathered stories about the meaning of the practice, strengthened their sense of

7 For example, Catherine Niptanatiak writes about how her understanding of tunniit has changed over time,

writing:

Before I learned the real reason for a traditional tattoo, I thought of it as a symbol of a woman who has

come into her own, who has taken her name and accepted who she is. They are used as a rite of passage and

a source of pride. I learned that the tattoos were done at puberty, when a young woman would be tested to

see if she could withstand the pain…Tattoos are also used as spiritual protection, a way of keeping one safe

and protected from forces greater than humankind. (Johnston 20)

Niptanatiak’s description indicates that there are multiple meanings for the practice of getting the tunniit: to

represent a woman’s readiness and aptitude to perform the challenges of womanhood like birthing, raising a family,

and caring for husband, but also as a marking of protection against threatening forces beyond one’s control. She also

shares what she had personally imagined the tunniit to mean, that it was a symbol of loving, accepting, and claiming

oneself, of having pride and confidence in oneself. Kanayok Klengenberg echoes that tunniit is used as a rite of

passage into womanhood and adds that the design of the tattoos holds meaning as well, meaning chosen by an elder.

She writes, “I know that traditional Inuit tattoos were given to women who were ready to become adults as a rite of

passage, with certain meanings and symbols given by an elder” (36).

Some of the women who participated in the Tattoo Revitalization Project, however, disagreed that there

was symbolism in the tattoos’ designs, noting that their primary function was simply to be beautiful. Doreen

Ayalikyoak Evyagotailak writes, “The elders said traditional tattoos were used to look nice, as they didn’t have

makeup back in their day. One elder told me the tattoos aren’t what people think they’re about, such as kids, family,

and so on. Women were tattooed for beauty. When I asked the elders if I could have my own meaning for my

tattoos, they said it wouldn’t matter” (30). In an interview with Vogue, Jaelynn Pitka echoes that the tradition holds

different meanings for different people, noting, “For each woman, their traditional markings hold different

meanings; mine represents resilience, bringing back our ways of life, and finding beauty in our culture. For me,

they’re a symbol of strength, and a reminder of how hard our ancestors fought for us to be here” (Allaire).

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community, and fostered cultural pride in a practice that colonists imbued with shame and

attempted to extinguish.

Because of how colonizers cast the practice as shameful, ugly, and savage as a way to

deter it, Johnston’s project and Novalinga’s TikToks help revive and cement the legacy of this

important practice. In “Kakiniit: The Art of Inuit Tattooing,” published in Canadian Geographic

Magazine, Inuk writer Jana Angulalik emphasizes that most importantly, where the practice was

once banned by colonizers and shrouded in shame as a means to discourage Inuit women from

continuing the cultural practice, Inuit women are now reclaiming it with pride. “Often, our

forehead markings, before our culture was interrupted, signified entering womanhood — the first

tattoo to mark shortly after menstruation began,” Angulalik writes; “Now, we are reclaiming our

culture and adapting it to fit our life today” (Angulalik).

Novalinga chooses to get tunniit with her mother to reclaim this cultural practice and

publishes nine videos that reference the tunniit on TikTok. Novalinga’s videos, simply by talking

about the tunniit with pride to largely Western audiences, are then already acts of resistance. By

showing her tattoos on TikTok, she defies the colonizers’ attempt to code the practice as ugly,

backwards, shameful, and takes a stand against their nearly-successful efforts to exterminate the

practice. Since Novalinga’s identity is, in part, a (super)model, framing her tunniit as part of

what makes her beautiful across multiple videos defies Western beauty norms and models Inuit

norms as beautiful. But Novalinga goes beyond simply representing the Inuit cultural practice as

a part of what makes her beautiful. In the paragraphs that follow, I analyze how Novalinga uses

TikTok to narrate her experience of getting the tunniit in ways that speak back to Western anti-

Inuit racism and sexism in a uniquely Inuit “wise anger” rhetoric.

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The first two of Novalinga’s tunniit-related videos do not express any anger. Instead they

seek to envelop the tunniit practice in cultural pride and help viewers see that this is an Inuit-

specific practice that means a lot to Novalinga. For example, the first video in what would

become a sequence is titled, “Received my markings #inuit #markings #tunniit #tattoo

#womanhood.” In this video, Novalinga simply documents herself getting the tunniit, which she

refers to as “my markings” in the video’s title and then offers more information about the

“markings” through her addition of the hashtags #inuit #markings #tunniit #tattoo #womanhood.

Novalinga does not narrate this video with her voice or the use of captions, as she often does in

other videos. Instead, the video edits together different close-up shots of Novalinga’s face while

an Inuk woman with blue dread-locked hair gives her the tunniit. The video closes with a shot of

Novalinga’s head and shoulders against a bright blue sky with earrings and a neat low-bun

showing off her tattoos by looking into the camera with a soft smile. She moves her face from

side to side like a model would do to showcase her tunniit in what could be called a “supermodel

gestural rhetorical” that conveys pride, confidence, and beauty and thus codes the facial tattoo as

beautiful to Novalinga’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. By using an audio clip titled,

“I am Woman” by Emmy Meli in combination with the hashtag #womanhood, Novalinga

highlights to viewers that the markings have a proudly gendered significance for her and for

#Inuit culture. Thus, by documenting herself proudly and confidently getting the markings,

Novalinga uses this video to diversify the representation of Inuit women on TikTok and offers a

self-representation of a young Inuk woman participating in a cultural practice that was nearly

extinguished by 19th and 20th century settler colonialists. The video has 5.6 million likes, 21.1

thousand comments, and just under 9,000 shares at the time of this writing in November 2022.

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In the second video chronologically in the series, titled, “Felt like they have always been

there!!! #traditional #tattoo #tunniit #culture #womanhood #inuk thank you @heyzorgzilla,”

posted on 11/29/2021, Novalinga expands on the content she presented in the first video by re-

narrating her process of getting the markings, this time using a popular TikTok trend operating

through both sound and form. Though this video does not express anger, I will describe it here

because the next video she posts remixes this one to insert anger at racist microaggressions. In

the trend, video creators move their head from screen left to center to screen right over multiple

videos spliced together over a countdown from ten to zero. Each count in the countdown is

synced with a new shot in which the subject’s head turns from screen left to right. The effect, as I

interpret it, is that the person is turning to look at themself in the present from the past and then

cuing up their representation of themself in the future in the next shot. Most of the videos that

comprise this trend narrate countdowns over moments leading up to major life events, most

commonly major surgeries. For example, one TikTok user splices together clips chronicling the

eight months leading up to a jaw surgery that completely changes the shape of her face. Creators

using this trend often use embedded captions within each shot change to describe the different

stages, which Novalinga does as well. The stories depicted in these videos tend to resolve in

happy endings where the quick succession of moments across the journey result successfully in a

long-awaited, often life-changing outcome.

By using this trend, Novalinga suggests that getting the tunniit was itself an exciting and

nerve-racking journey that resulted in a long-awaited, life-changing outcome. Throughout the

different cuts in her own countdown video, Novalinga appears happy and nervous in anticipation

of the procedure. She conveys these emotions through the facial rhetorics of heightened

eyebrows over closed-lip smiles and looking from side to side. The video shows Novalinga in

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different locations over the cuts, first in her kitchen and finally inside her car, presumably en

route to the appointment. The video ends with footage of Novalinga receiving the markings and

closes on a short clip of Novalinga in the car with the final markings, presumably this time going

home after the appointment. In the video’s title, Novalinga includes a long sequence of hashtags,

#traditional #tattoo #tunniit #culture #womanhood #inuk, which helps frame her tattoo for non-

Indigenous audiences as a meaningful cultural practice and increases circulation of the video8.

By the third video in this sequence, however, Novalinga introduce angry Inuk rhetoric to

dissent against microaggressions and claim control of the narrative. On December 5, one week

after the first tunniit post, Novalinga tells a longer version of the “Journey of getting [her] first

tattoo,” as the titular caption describes and this time includes several comments speaking back to

microaggressors. Through the embodied rhetoric of her facial expressions (facial rhetoric), the

aural rhetoric of the TikTok sound she uses, and the textual rhetoric of the captions she has

embedded within the video, Novalinga tells the story of getting her first tattoo as a story touched

by happiness, excitement, pride, nervousness, countercultural resistance, and wise anger at the

recurring racist and sexist response to her choice to get the markings. While I would not

characterize this video as displaying or using an emotion that is immediately perceptible to

Western audiences as “anger” outright, in characteristic angry Inuk rhetorical fashion, the video

8 The title of this 14-second video, however, indicates that there is more behind Novalinga’s strategy in the

video than merely narrating her tunniit story as a meaningful journey, increasing the circulation of that narrative, and

promoting her tattoo artist. In the first part of the title, “Felt like they have always been there!!!,” Novalinga frames

the tattoos as feeling natural and appropriate, like they belong to her face and like she belongs to the culture from

which this practice hails. This countercultural framing is significant given the fact that settler colonialists used

shame as a primary and effective strategy to try to extinguish the practice. Novalinga’s pride expressed in the title

and emphasized through the use of three exclamation points emphatically speaks back against settler colonial

repression and reclaims the practice as a proud and ongoing one. The use of three exclamation points suggests

moreover that beyond “speaking back,” Novalinga is “shouting” back. This is where the “angry Inuk” rhetoric starts

to appear in her tunniit-related videos. In the next tunniit-related video, Novalinga splices new clips into this same

sequence of shots to speak back to microaggressions, express cultural pride more explicitly, and add more details to

her documentation of the process.

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expresses dissent alongside joy by interweaving her response to racist comments into the story of

her tunniit journey, demonstrating how for persons from marginalized cultures and/or identities,

pride and joy are always burdened by the need to coexist alongside resistance and dissent.

In the video, Novalinga uses multiple TikTok affordances to assert her angry Inuk

rhetoric against the racist comments she has received: video trend, narrative sequence, the “reply

to” TikTok feature, and in-video captioning. In the December 5 video, Novalinga again uses the

countdown trend from the previous video, this time against different audio and to include a more

varied and descriptive version of the “journey.” Novalinga’s video is consistent with all of the

previously described elements of the trend and adds an additional layer: she weaves in a

depiction of the racism she experiences along her journey and her wisely angry response to it. By

using the trend, Novalinga inserts her specifically Inuit story into the crosscultural representation

of stories depicted in this trend. What she depicts with pride is a practice that Western settler

colonialists attempted to extinguish and which transgresses gendered Western beauty norms.

Novalinga also uses narrative sequence strategically to assert her antiracist response to

racist and sexist comments about her choice to get the tunniit. Though most of the clips in

Novalinga’s story represent her excitement and happiness in anticipation of getting the tattoo, the

first few clips frame the journey as one tainted by the ubiquity of racist, colonial narratives

within which her actions are unfortunately always situated. The first four captioned frames of the

video read as follows: "Will travel 4 hours to get my face tattooed. / Everyone telling me I will

regret it even if it's cultural / Me keeping my appointment anyway / My heart telling me my

ancestors will be proud.” In the first frame, her facial expressions convey excitement and

nervousness. She is smiling and looking at the camera, moving her head in time with the upbeat

pop song, and picking at her lip in a way that suggests nervousness alongside the excitement.

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The second frame shows Novalinga with her characteristically angry Inuk serious, unsmiling

expression. Still looking straight at the camera, she overlays the caption, “Everyone telling me I

will regret it even if it’s cultural,” which is a racist microaggression. In the third, her smile is

back as she conveys her response to the colonialist commentary with the embedded text, “Me

keeping my appointment anyway.” In this instance, she uses a smile in a subtle subversion of

gendered anger norms by using TikTok to smile defiantly in her public response to the racist

microaggression. In the next caption in the video, Novalinga gives more context to her rejection

of the colonialist commentary by saying, “My heart telling me my ancestors will be proud.”

Then for the rest of the 41-second video, Novalinga expresses only excitement and pride at what

getting her first tunniit represents for her. By narrating the story in this way-- opening with

excitement, acknowledging the racist, colonial context in which her cultural traditions are read,

rejecting colonialist interpretations of her actions, and then spending most of the video

conveying her positive emotions about what participating in the tradition means to her--

Novalinga uses defiant anger to reject racist dominant narratives en route to self-representing this

cultural practice to multiple millions of viewers online. She drops in angry Inuk rhetoric but

doesn’t dwell in it. Like the other activists in this dissertation, Novalinga interweaves her wise

anger among other positive emotions, modeling that in contact with racism and sexism, anger is

justified, especially if used intentionally.

In the video titled, “Even after I explained how significant they were. Standing by my

ancestors <both hands up emoji>,” Novalinga again uses the multimodal affordances of TikTok

to speak back to someone who criticized her face tattoos offline. The video opens on Novalinga

looking serious; again she uses the gestural rhetoric of “unsmiling.” Because her eyebrows are in

a resting position, she seems on the displeased side of neutral. As she looks down and to the side

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with her mouth closed, the anger becomes more palpable. Overlaying her serious face while the

music plays, white text appears: "To the person who came up to me and said, 'Let me go get a

rag and remove the dirt off of your face’” (see figures 1 and 2 above). Using unsmiling facial

rhetoric and visually repeating and recontextualizing the racist, sexist remark, Novalinga takes

control of the narrative on her TikTok channel and publicly speaks back with wise anger to her

microaggressor. By next lip syncing to the TikTok sound, "I am My Mother's Savage Daughter,"

Novalinga co-opts the stereotype of the “savage” Indigenous person through the lyrics of the

Figure 1 "To the person who came up to me and said"

Figure 2 "Let me go get a rag and remove the dirt off

of your face"

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song and uses facial rhetoric to express a defiant pride in her Inuit identity. The song lyrics

appear in red as her mouth changes then from serious to smiling; the lyrics read: "I am my

mother's savage daughter / I will not lower my voice” (see figures 3 and 4 below). As the video

progresses, Novalinga lip syncing cuts to spliced together photographs of Inuit people from past

generations with the traditional tattoos on their faces (see figures 5 and 6). She uses the sound

and video to hold our gaze on her still, serious face as the music continues. Novalinga asserts the

historical value of kakiniq and diversifies representation of indigenous women in viewers’ feeds.

Figure 3 " I am my mother's savage daughter"

Figure 4 "I will not lower my voice"

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She uses the gestural rhetoric of an unsmiling face to speak back to haters, challenge

microaggressions, and provide the kind of diversified representation that can address the larger

problem of white dominance and white supremacy in mainstream media.

In another tunniit-related video, posted on December 13, Novalinga uses unsmiling facial

rhetoric and speech in a “stripped down” video style to respond to racists and disbelievers in

another characteristic act of angry Inuk rhetoric. In the opening shot of this video, viewers see

Novalinga’s unsmiling face with a word bubble graphic in the upper left corner showing the

user’s response that says, "I seriously doubt someone said that." Viewers can presume this

Figures 5 and 6 Two of several black and white photos depicting Inuit women with tunniit

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comment came in response to the last video in which Novalinga quotes someone telling her they

would "get a rag to remove the dirt off of her face." In a handheld, straight on closeup shot of

Novalinga speaking into camera, she responds through speech:

I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of racism there is in Canada. What was

said to me on that day about my tattoos was just not caught on film. But I mostly got

these comments from older generations. And I don't directly live in the city although

people in the city still get a lot of racism. Someone told me that I would have trouble

getting good job opportunities. That I tried imitating rappers. That I will ruin my beauty.

You get the point. I did make that video to have an open discussion on this topic. I think

revitalizing culture triggers a lot of people. Just like when I started throat singing. I'm

starting to understand because people aren't used to it. But any form of racism, whether

it's small or big, affects our lives, which is why it's so important to talk about it so we can

change that.

Responding ostensibly directly to a user but posting the video to her main profile with the much

broader audience of her 4 million plus viewers and anyone in whose “For You” page her video

might appear, Novalinga elevates the dialogue between herself and her microaggressor to an

enormous global audience. She does so in a way that raises awareness about the underestimated

prevalence of racism in Canada, labels it harmful, and encourages more public discourse about it

in the service of positive change. She does so with a neutral, serious expression, offering users

yet another model for how to speak back to power with wise anger.

Novalinga also explicitly uses her tunniit as a visual rhetoric of dissent in another video

to the same Bobby Sanchez sound. In this video, posted on February 15, 2022, Novalinga

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recreates a video trend she’s already done in order to include the visual rhetoric of her tunniit

(see figures 7 and 8, two excerpts from the longer video). This video reuses the sound trend to

Bobby Sanchez’ audio called, “Quechua 101 Land Back Please.” In her video’s title, “Had to

redo with my tattoo: Please don’t talk to me about decolonization,” Novalinga indicates that she

wanted to recreate the video with her new tunniit, implying that she recognizes the video’s power

and wants to represent herself in the trend with her new cultural markings, the permanent ink on

her face a testament to the permanence of both Inuit culture and her commitment to her cultural

identity. Novalinga types out Sanchez’ lyrics in embedded captions over each frame to

essentially reclaim them as her own words or show that she agrees with their message. The lyrics

read, as in this chapter’s epigraph:

Please don’t talk to me ‘bout decolonization

When you still speaking in the colonizers’ language

See you genocide us, then you colonize us

See you sterilized us, and now you fetishize us

See you stigmatize us

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Novalinga uses the lyrics and sound to mime Indigenous anger about colonization over Sanchez’

audio file, as Sanchez’ lyrics reference colonial harm and tell listeners not to coopt the language

of “decolonization” without truly understanding the harmful legacy of colonization. She redoes

this video with her tunniit to underscore her anger about this legacy and challenge viewers to do

more than just “talk” about decolonization.

Figure 7. Please don't talk to me about decolonization.

Figure 8. And now you fetishize us

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Conclusion

In this chapter, I have formulated what I call “angry Inuk” rhetoric as a wise anger

strategy that Shina Novalinga deploys on TikTok in order to challenge anti-Indigenous racism

and ongoing settler colonialist harm. Though I have argued throughout this dissertation for the

positive value of these young women’s digital anger rhetorics, I would be remiss if I did not at

least briefly discuss the emotional and energetic cost to these young people of their efforts to

challenge oppressive cultures. Since writing this chapter, Novalinga announced on Instagram

that she had attempted suicide in November 2022.

In her Instagram post’s caption, she tells followers: "I want to share my story with you

because I know deep down I’m not alone. I am tired of putting this image everyday when in

reality, I am battling with depression. Mental illness is real" (“On November 1st of this year I’ve

attempted to end my life”). Novalinga’s heart-wrenching post underscores the many-edged

sword social media can be. In interviews, she has discussed how much she appreciates the ways

her videos have enabled community-building with Indigenous creators from different cultures

through the hashtag #NativeTikTok. She has also spoken about being grateful to be able to “help

people embrace who they are, and make them want to learn more about their own cultures”

(Nash). Yet, her interviews have also revealed her behind-the-scenes struggle with the aggression

she uses the platform to protest. In an interview with Elle Canada, Novalinga spoke publicly

about the volume of racist comments her posts are met with and the damage they cause. “I deal

with a lot of discriminatory comments,” she says, “which weigh on my mental health.” In the

interview, she emphasizes her determination to “focus on the positive—the love and support that

I’m also getting” and to make change, which she defines as “helping create a safe space where

every Indigenous community feels represented and valued” (Cardin-Goyer).

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Social media platforms are paradoxical in that they can afford the creation of somewhat

safe spaces for marginalized communities and give marginalized individuals a voice, but they

also expose those communities and individuals to harm, sometimes at an enormous volume.

Indeed there has been a high correlation between increasing social media use among young

women and the increasing rates of anxiety, depression, disordered body image and eating, and

suicide. When Novalinga says, “I know I am not alone,” in her suicide post caption, she

acknowledges that her attempt is not an isolated, individual incident to be pathologized.

Unfortunately, Novalinga’s post reflects a rising trend in suicide rates among young women in

Generation Z; nearly one in three young women from Generation Z has seriously considered

suicide, a recent CDC study reports. While TikTok can be a powerful and empowering tool to

push back against oppressive anger norms and diversify the narratives that circulate about one’s

people, it is important to acknowledge that going public with one’s digital rhetoric of norm-

transgressing anger comes at a cost. Further scholarship is necessary to tease out how young

women can use these platforms for good while minimizing the attendant risks.

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Conclusion: Networked Micro-Counterstories That Help Us Feel

Together

Margaret listened. She began to learn: there was no new thing under the

sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and

stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred--or

never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents’ arms

only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children

pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to

track their path. Things she’d been able to not know, until now. There was

a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the

same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent’s head. It was

whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some

otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an

invasive weed, something to be eradicated.

—Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

In this dissertation, in ways direct and indirect, I attempt to draw us closer together in

feeling across our differences. I want to underscore the importance and constructiveness of

marginalized people’s access to anger in asymmetrical power relations so that people across

social differences may feel what I have formulated as “wise anger” at injustice in solidarity with

one another, rather than responding defensively. The ultimate goal is social healing. In the

epigraph above from Celeste Ng’s 2022 novel, Our Missing Hearts, the protagonist Margaret has

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sought out families whose children have been disappeared in the realist dystopian setting of the

plot: Chinese Americans and shortly anyone with a whiff of Asian descent are scapegoated for

the nation’s economic instability. Through countless hours of silently, respectfully, lovingly

listening to people’s stories, Margaret sees a common theme emerge through all the stories of

missing children: hatred and fear of difference.

The dystopian premise of Our Missing Hearts is darkly credible for how nearly it

resembles similar episodes from United States history and recent past. The book is an ode to the

importance of knowledge, of ethical truth-seeking about groups and power and the importance of

seeing and respecting the dignity of each person across differences. Ng moves readers to

recognize the importance of resisting narratives that stoke hate and fear. As novels do, the book

offers readers an opportunity to identify with its complex protagonists in ways that challenge

their stereotypes. Also as novels do, the book affords readers the opportunity to feel with those

protagonists, which helps readers respect their humanity and the humanity of those like them in

readers’ world outside the novel.

As I wrote this dissertation, I started to see social media as a powerful means for ordinary

youth to tell their own stories in ways that challenge stereotypes and diversify narratives.

Particularly visual and video-oriented platforms like TikTok and Instagram enable self-authoring

and self-publishing micro-stories at scale. These platforms afford more potential authenticity and

autonomy over one’s narrative and the opportunity to model emotional expression in ways that

potentially increased empathetic understanding. As I tack out on my chapters in this conclusion, I

consider how in aggregate, these diversified, self-authored narratives have the potential to invite

feeling across difference at scale.

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At first glance, especially in the time of the social media “outrage machine,” it may seem

like a project about anger, about women’s anger, is yet one more divisive text, or, another

argument about victimhood—an argument about who gets to be the victim and who deserves to

be angry. I would argue for a different framing. While I certainly do argue that young women

deserve to be angry, the deeper argument is about the importance of respecting emotional

intelligence more broadly. The more activism-related conference panels I attend, and the more

articles and books I read and research I do about the oppression of specific groups, the more I

believe the route to equality, or better yet, to mutual healing and transformation, passes through

an intersection of feeling. It seems increasingly clear to me that we must feel together, we must

feel with each other, to move forward together. To feel together, we must become more

conscious of the conditioning of the feelings we experience and the reactions we have to others’

feelings. Specifically, we must understand the distinction between anger rooted in hatred or fear

and anger rooted in love, hope, and solidarity. This project attempts to help readers discern

between these angers, particularly as the circulation of anger is at an all-time high in human

history by design.

Project Summary

This dissertation has aimed at several more explicit objectives: to expand and nuance

scholars’ and publics’ anger vocabulary and anger literacy in public discourse; to recognize the

wisdom of emotions, broadly speaking, and of young women’s anger more specifically across

different subject positions; to articulate the liberation of constructive anger as an important part

of the struggle for equality and justice across contemporary global cultures; to undermine the

oppressive stereotype of teen girls and young women as illegitimately and unreasonably

emotional by offering an alternative, more respectful and more accurate framework for

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understanding young women as capable of being perceptive, informed, intelligent, and wise; to

consider how popular social media platforms enable and constrain youth in changing oppressive

norms; and to reflect on the relationship between the expression of anger by marginalized

persons and the intersectional feminist struggle for a liberatory future. In short, “Modeling Wise

Angers Online” has worked to make visible some of the many ways youth activists from

Generation Z use social media to assert a more progressive ideology by defying oppressive

stereotypes about girls’ anger and modeling alternative ideologies.

Together, the chapters on Greta Thunberg’s use of Twitter, Thandiwe Abdullah’s use of

Instagram Stories, and Shina Novalinga’s use of TikTok demonstrate that social media can

function as digital platforms that enable young people to seize means of cultural production to

enact the world they want to live in. On Twitter in 2019, a 16-year-old Swedish girl with autism

challenged conservative world leaders and demonstrated how teen girls and youth activists can

be more rational than adult leaders, even as they are sometimes very reasonably angry. On

Instagram in 2020, a 16-year-old Black girl (at the time) modeled how informed, insightful

political analysis necessarily produces anger that can be a healthy and ordinary feature of daily

life for a youth activist. On TikTok in 2020 and 2021, a 22-year-old Inuk woman wielded anger

across a range of content creation strategies to disrupt oppressive stereotypes about Indigenous

women and speak back against continuing colonial harms to Indigenous communities.

Below I summarize the implications of my analysis of these youth activists’ digital

rhetorics of feminist rage for several areas of study: digital and rhetorical scholars’

understandings of Generation Z youth activism and social media, digital cultural rhetorics, anger

rhetorics, and gendered anger oppression and feminist scholarship, along with a possible

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contribution to how Aja Martinez’ framework of the “counterstory” might work in a 21st century

digital context.

Gen Z Youth Activism and Social Media

Social media platforms offer young people the ability to speak for themselves,

unmediated by the reporting and narration of adult journalists, authors, and storytellers. I do not

mean to suggest that social media affords “unmediated” speech, whatever that might mean.

Rather, young people are able to hold the mic for themselves and can listen to each other at an

unprecedented scale because of the direct access to peers’ expressions that social media affords.

Because of social media, young women activists in particular are able to speak for themselves

back to the adult discourse that delegitimizes and dehumanizes them. This dissertation has shown

how different platforms can attract different audiences and afford different means of speaking

back. Chapter one has shown how Greta Thunberg used Twitter to speak back directly to the

conservative adult leaders who mock and belittle her. Beyond reaching these direct interlocutors,

Thunberg’s use of Twitter ensures that millions more around the world will witness these

exchanges because of the reach of both her own audience directly on Twitter and the extended

circulation achieved by mainstream media’s coverage of these Twitter exchanges. Chapters two

and three have shown how Thandiwe Abdullah and Shina Novalinga use the visual platforms of

Instagram and TikTok to self-represent to largely peer audiences and in so doing, model forms of

anger expression that defy xenophobic, racist, ageist stereotypes.

As discussed in the introduction, however, I do want to temper my celebration of what

the social media platforms afford youth activists in a few different ways: by troubling the

uncritical hopes so often placed on so-called “new” media and by drawing attention to the

consequences social media design and use can have on mental health.

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As critical digital studies scholars have shown, rarely are “new media” entirely “new.”

Arguably all new media are a revision and remix of older media that people then use in inventive

and iterative ways (Bolter and Grusin). Neither are the media themselves entirely new, nor is the

fact that youth use them to participate in public discourse. While I maintain that the geographic

and temporal scale at which youth can communicate is orders of magnitude greater than previous

communication media have allowed, the fact is that youth have always seized their era’s “new”

media to produce self-authored content and speak to peers at that era’s scale. Youth’s use of

radio in the 1930s offers one example of this precedent. There are many more. Further, while

social media affords anyone with access to a cell phone the potential to communicate with these

vast audiences, increased access does not actually mean equal access to public speech.

Asymmetrical power relations still shape whose voice makes it onto the platform and whose

voices get picked up and recirculated. What is unique about the networked, digital, “social”

communication technologies this dissertation examines is the ways they afford immediate

interaction with enormously large and diverse audiences that include youth and world leaders

alike.

What I haven’t fully touched on is how the scale of these digital interactions can and do

have profound negative consequences on youth’s mental health. Though this vast and important

topic is beyond the scope of this dissertation, I want to acknowledge what Mitch Prinstein, the

chief science officer at the American Psychological Association reported to the Senate Judiciary

Committee in February 2023: "Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving

together to shape human development for millennia. ... Within the last 20 years, the advent of

portable technology and social media platforms [has been] changing what took 60,000 years to

evolve…We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development.” While I

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don’t want to overly imply direct causation between social media and teen suicide, it is

interesting and troubling to note the coinciding increase in suicide among teen girls over the past

decade, as documented by the CDC.

“America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,”

reported Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, (St. George). In 2021, almost one in

three teen girls reported having seriously considered suicide, an increase of almost 60% since

2011. The report also reveals that during this decade girls were almost twice as likely as boys to

experience bullying on social media or through texting. Among girls, White, American Indian or

Alaska Native, and LGBQ+ were targeted more than other cultural or racial identity groups. As

Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of

Education describes, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing

conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and

aggression” (as qtd in St. George). Indeed, since researching and writing the dissertation,

Abdullah has largely stopped using Instagram and Novalinga’s most recent post (to Instagram)

documents a recent attempt at suicide. I do not want to speculate about either person’s reasons

for these choices, but I do think it is safe to say these choices reflect some uneasiness (to put it

lightly) around the influence using these platforms has had on their lives. It is interesting to me

that they have both used their social media platforms to speak out with anger against dominant,

hateful ideologies.

It is my belief that recognizing girls’ anger as wise, meaningful, and important, and

helping them to see it that way too can help disrupt girls’ tendency to “internalize conflict and

stress and fear” and instead channel despair and suffering into wise anger and collective action.

If taught, in part by the wise anger modeling of peer role models, how to channel anger into

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meaningful, constructive action, girls can move through their despair to experience the more

energizing emotion of anger and see themselves as agentic and powerful. But their anger has to

be normalized and respected by adults, first. I don’t mean to suggest that liberating girls’ anger is

a panacea, but I do believe it could go a long way to help both girls and their allies understand

themselves as capable of making meaningful change in the systems that perpetuate their

suffering. I see anger as a vehicle toward hope in a world in which the pull to despair is strong.

Digital Cultural Rhetorics

In this dissertation, I have also wrestled with questions that productively challenge and

help add complexity to how scholars can apply cultural rhetorical frameworks in digital contexts.

Studying the rhetoric of subjects from different cultural backgrounds who speak to globally

networked audiences online, I had to ask myself: which culture’s interpretive frames should I use

to analyze rhetoric that circulates on globally networked social media? With Gen Z activists, this

dissertation has asserted that while there is no way to meaningfully assert a singular

interpretation of any digital rhetorical act, it is the scholar’s responsibility to familiarize oneself

with a rhetor’s particular context, including their cultural background and cultural frames, in

order to analyze their discourse. If the scholar can reasonably assume that the rhetors imagine

global audiences for their digital discourse, then scholars must do their best to analyze how a

given rhetor is navigating both their own cultural framework and the dominant cultural

framework of their global audiences. This is a project doomed to failure given its scope but a

worthy exercise nonetheless. With Thunberg, for example, given her exchanges with specific

interlocutors, it is easier to name the conservative ideology that her rhetoric is in conversation

with than for Abdullah, whose smaller following and use of fleeting Instagram Stories suggests a

more local and limited audience, although not entirely. Novalinga, on the other hand,

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intentionally links her TikTok videos not only to other Indigenous creators’ videos, but to any

“cultural” creator’s content using hashtags like #indigenous, #nativetiktok, and the extremely

broad hashtag #culture. For each of these rhetors, then, I have read texts written by, for, and

about the primary cultural contexts from which they hail in order to contextualize how their

digital rhetoric may be shaped by these contexts, but I have also considered how dominant norms

and stereotypes circulate online in ways that these rhetors must also navigate.

Anger Rhetorics and Unsmiling

How do you sustain anger? At first what I thought I was seeing was a widespread

changing of anger norms that would stick. I thought optimistically that once shifted, the anger

norm would stay changed. Now I interpret the shifting of these norms differently. Because of

anger’s cyclical nature, it erupts into national discourse and peters out, going quiet for a time, but

the movement towards its liberation inches forward. During the Renaissance--thanks to Karen

Nelson for this insight--anger was conceptualized as a flame or fire that burns hot and burns out.

In other words, it is fleeting. It is not designed to last. This metaphor is helpful for understanding

how anger norms change over time even if their changed state is not always visible. Collective

anger needs public events to draw it back out into the discourse.

I do think we see evidence in the shifting of anger norms over time when we consider the

kinds of reactions that girls’ and women’s anger meets in public discourse. Take one recent

example at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow on November 2, 2021 where Greta Thunberg

sang into a microphone, “you can shove the climate crisis up your arse,” while jumping up and

down and smiling. Profanity, like Abdullah’s middle fingers and Thunberg’s provocative

assertion, ruptures listeners out of complacency and says to audiences that the circumstances are

dire enough to warrant profanity. In other words, I read Thunberg’s joyful act of profanity as an

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act of defiance and anger. Notably, Thunberg did not start her work as an activist using profanity

in public speech. Girls who disobey ageist, sexist scripts in public speech outright usually don’t

get very far. She had to garner audiences and build her credibility through observance to

traditional decorum in the arena of public discourse. But little by little, over time, Thunberg

introduced anger in ways that stuck. So that just three years after her first protest, she is singing

“shove the climate crisis up your arse” without losing audiences. It is true for all the activists in

this dissertation that there were fewer expressions of anger at the beginning of their public

speech acts than by the close of this dissertation. I interpret this increase over time as a sign that

it takes baby steps for those who have been conditioned not to be angry to dare to express their

anger in public, unapologetically. This is why I think more young people modeling this

transgressive emotion can help make way for other young people to feel empowered to get

wisely angry. This dissertation contributes behavior modeling as a mode of digital activism for

helping to shift oppressive norms.

I also think my formulation of “unsmiling” as a feminist facial rhetoric that defies what I

call “smile culture” can help scholars articulate both how misogyny perpetuates women’s anger

as an outlaw emotion and how girls and women push back. Tracing how smile culture has been

challenged over the past ten years exemplifies how norms change over time both as a cause and

reflection of larger feminist ideological change.

Smile culture, as I have defined it in the dissertation, describes the patriarchal and sexist

cultural imperative for women to always appear pretty and accommodating, which requires

smiling when in public. Smile culture crosses transnational borders. Smile culture has also seen

many forms of resistance over the past decade. In 2012, before the phenomenon was widely

discussed, artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh created an art series in which she interviewed women she

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met on the street about their experiences with this kind of gender-based street harassment and

created portraits to display in public spaces. She called the project, “Stop Telling Women to

Smile” (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Features the logo for Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s project, “Stop Telling Women to

Smile”. In the image, a woman of color appears unsmiling next to the words “Stop Telling

Women to Smile.” The image appears to have been drawn in charcoal. Image source:

stoptellingwomentosmile.com

In “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman,” Rob Bliss compiles unscripted video footage of

the street harassment a woman receives while walking through regular New York City streets,

wearing-- not that it should matter-- black jeans and a black tee shirt. The video was created for a

non-profit organization focused on ending gender-based street harassment. In the video, the

woman is told by men to smile twice in the first five seconds of footage; the pace of verbal

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harassment persists through the two-minute video. The video went viral, receiving over 45

million views in five days (Bliss). This video not only started a conversation about gender-based

street harassment, but quickly became a meme, launching countless other "10 hours walking as a

[insert gender, race, clothing item] in [insert city]” videos from Manila to Zombie Apocalypse.

The original video title’s lack of reference to the woman’s race reveals its colorblind ideology,

but the internet responded by turning the video into a meme and showing the experiences of

differently raced women walking in different cities around the world. Though these videos have

sparked transnational conversations about gender-based street harassment, this meme frames the

issue around men harassing women, rather than around the ways men use emotion norms, like

disallowing anger, as a tool of subordination.

The circulation of content that challenges smile culture explicitly has been most prolific

on YouTube and Twitter. Youtube videos that parody smile culture specifically have become

their own meme; see “Smile” (2014, 188,000+ views as of the time of this writing) and “Smyle

for Women” (2016, 146,000+ views). A segment posted to Youtube from Chelsea Handler’s

2016 Netflix series, Chelsea, titled, “Men, Stop Telling Women to Smile” has received almost

200k views at the time of this writing. In 2017, when the British Independent Workers’ Party

account tweeted unironically, “Who ‘tells you to smile randomly on the street’? No one of

course, you made that up,” @MollyOShah’s response tweet, “Lmao retweet if a stranger has ever

told you to smile,” was retweeted over 70,000 times in a few days. When the popular millennial

show Broad City depicted a characteristic instance of sexist smile solicitation happening on a

New York City street, the characters’ defiant response was promptly turned into a gif and

continues to circulate regularly on social media as a handy feminist response to sexist micro-

aggressions (Figure 2). The easy virality of these critiques of what I call smile culture reflects a

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transcultural women’s hunger for a means to resist the subtle but powerful sexist commonplace

of demanding women perform their subservient femininity by smiling at all times in public. In

this dissertation, I discuss how each teen subject exploits the unique affordances of different

social media platforms to resist smile culture using unsmiling facial rhetoric in similar and

different ways.

Figure 2. A GIF showing the two, white, 20-something-year-old female protagonists of

Broad City using their middle fingers to force insincere smiles on their faces sarcastically. Image

source: Giphy.

Gendered Anger Oppression and Feminist Scholarship

As discussed in chapter two, I originally conceptualized this dissertation project through

the binary gendered framework of men’s vs. women’s anger because I have approached the

possible shifts in anger norms through a Western historic lens that has defined gender as binary

and oppressed women specifically while empowering men. I have been interested in

investigating women’s anger because, as the non-dominant gender category, it is women’s anger

that has been historically marginalized, subordinated, and repressed. It is the outlawing of

women’s anger specifically that patriarchy has used as a tool to maintain men’s power and

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authority. However, Abdullah’s changing gender identity made me think more critically about

the intersection of gender, anger, and power, especially as Generation Z was moving swiftly

away from binary notions of gender. Abdullah made me ask myself: whose anger really needs

liberating and can women’s and nonbinary people’s anger be considered under the same category

of marginalized anger? Ultimately, I came to see that this project’s deepest investment is less in

liberating women’s anger than it is in enabling readers to see how the outlawing of anger

functions as a tool of oppression in asymmetrical power relations. For now, girls’ and young

women’s anger, across other identity intersections like race, class, ability, and culture, requires

concerted efforts to liberate. Future feminist scholarship should attend to the cultural politics of

emotion across multiple gender identities beyond the binary framework.

Micro-Counterstories

Finally, in reading these case studies together, I see resonances with what Aja Martinez

calls “counterstory.” As I discussed in chapters two and three, visual, narrative-oriented

platforms like Instagram and TikTok afford what I call “multimodal microstories.” In the short

narratives these platforms enable users to produce and publish, users don’t feel like they need to

say something extraordinary or overthink what they post. Users are in fact encouraged by design

and platform discourse norms to post regularly and share freely snippets from their daily life. As

a result, people using the platforms who do and do not produce their own content can choose to

follow people posting these microstories, and in so doing, diversify their exposure to “everyday

others’” stories, if they so choose. The multimodal microstories these platforms afford can

function as micro-counterstories, adapting Martinez’ theory of the counterstory to the realm of

social media.

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Counterstories, according to Martinez, are narratives presented by those in marginalized

subject positions that make visible how dominant ideologies oppress and harm subjects like

those telling the story. Counterstories are told from “experiential and embodied knowledge” (38)

which video-based platforms like Instagram and TikTok make particularly shareable.

Counterstories are told by “outsiders” and challenge stereotypes and “stock stories” with the

specificity, subjectivity, and nuance of individuals’ lived experience. “Stock stories” are stories

fabricated by “insiders” or those who hold the dominant subject position in an asymmetrical

power structure to “establish a shared sense of identity, reality, and naturalization of their

superior position” (38). Martinez advocates the important role counterstories play in

decolonizing the academy. I would argue that in aggregate, the digital micro-counterstories that

marginalized young people tell on social media play an important role in challenging enduring

stereotypes and decolonizing the digital public sphere.

I think social media can be powerful platforms for micro-counterstory telling especially

because of the global diversity of marginalized youth using these platforms to intertwine their

activism with content-sharing and storytelling from their daily lives. The three individuals my

dissertation has focused on are far from the only three activists using social media platforms in

this way. In further research, I would especially like to consider how Indigenous climate change

activists, like Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Michelle Chubb, Autumn Peltier, and Xiye Bastida, are

using social media to assert Indigenous paradigms through micro-counterstorytelling about

alternative relations to the planet.

Conclusion: Respecting Anger as a Means of Social Healing

Healing requires accountability from the others with whose lives ours are entangled.

Dana L. Cloud’s Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetorics of

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Therapy (1998) and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness reveal different cultural messaging

mechanisms that function to alienate individuals in neoliberalism from their angry social critique

and instead shuttle them into individualized programs of self-healing. These individualized

programs pathologize suffering and instruct people to transcend life’s hardships and heal

themselves individually. Cloud studies therapeutic discourses and finds that psychotherapy, a

paradigm that treats the individual, prescribes/preaches “adaptation” and “coping” to structural

and social issues. Through the therapeutic model, individuals seek to heal themselves and only

themselves from society’s structural injustices, rather than transform society. Social healing, on

the other hand, requires collective feeling and collective action. To feel together for social

healing, I argue, we must recover anger from its culturally outlawed position.

Karen McLaren describes how Western cultures encourage people to bypass anger and

jump to forgiveness in order to resolve conflict. This is a problem, McLaren instructs, because

anger and forgiveness must “work together (and often at the same time) in any real healing

process.” She calls anger and forgiveness “equal partners in the journey toward healing” and

asserts that there cannot be meaningful forgiveness where anger was repressed. Forgiveness

requires a process that starts with acknowledging the original wound, feeling anger about it so

that we can reestablish our boundaries. But the process does not end with anger; rather, anger is

an important step of the journey toward healing. As McLaren writes:

There are no shortcuts, no magical techniques, and no road maps to forgiveness. It is a

soul-making and culture-healing process that requires the fullness of all of the emotions.

Real forgiveness frees people and shoots them forward in consciousness, and it can’t

exist without true anger, true grief, true panic, and full emotional integrity.

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In this dissertation, I hope readers will leave with a deepened respect for the important role wise

anger must be allowed to play in the lives of all people, but in particular, for teen girls and young

women. Respecting marginalized youth’s wise anger is an important step on the path to social

healing and collective liberation.

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Figures Referenced in Text

Figure 1.

Caption: TIME Magazine cover with Greta Thunberg.

Figure 2.

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Caption: Screenshot of Donald J. Trump’s tweet on Dec 12, 2019, which reads: “So ridiculous.

Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie

with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill! https://t.co/M8ZtS8okzE”

Figure 3.

Caption: Screenshot by the author of Greta Thunberg’s Twitter bio, which reads: “A teenager

working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old

fashioned movie with a friend.”

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Figure 4.

Caption: Screenshot of Thunberg’s Twitter profile on December 11, 2019 with the single word

“pirralha” appearing in the bio section.

169

Figure 5.

Caption: On December 10, 2019, Twitter user @akureki writes, “THE BRAZILIAN

PRESIDENT CALLED GRETA A BRAT (pirralha) AND LOOK WHAT SHE DID IT’S THE

SECOND TIME I’M WHEEZING”. This tweet has 44 retweets, 11 quote tweets, and 199 likes.

Figure 6.

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Caption: On December 10, 2019, Twitter user @rosemeri replies to a #climatestrike post by

@GretaThunberg dating back to September 2018, writing, “Do you know what PIRRALHA

means? A spoiled child, willful, annoying and presumptuous.Just like you.” The tweet has no

comments, reshares, or likes.

Figure 7.

Caption: The image is a screenshot taken by the author of Thunberg’s March 15, 2021 tweet

described in the essay. The screenshot includes one user’s response to the tweet that reads,

“Keep being seriously annoying please.” with a winking smiley face emoji.

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Figure 8.

Caption: Screenshot by author of Thunberg’s Twitter bio, which reads, “Seriously annoying.”

Figure 9.

Caption: Screenshot by author of Guenther Schneider’s reply to Greta Thunberg, which reads,

“For every hater, there are thousands of people who respect and love what you do. Stay strong,

stay seriously annoying.” The screenshot also shows that the post was tweeted on April 20 and

had received four likes at the time the screen shot was taken.

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Appendix

Below is a small sampling of the ways that the phrase “seriously annoying,” Thunberg’s

sarcastic, pro-activist response to Priti Patel’s policing bill, circulated across Twitter. This

collection is meant to offer a non-comprehensive but somewhat representative look at the range

of ways other Twitter users amplify Thunberg’s tactic.

Figure 1.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @sliceandserve made on March

16. In this tweet, @sliceandserve shares a screenshot of Thunberg’s Twitter bio (“Seriously

Annoying”) with the text, “I too, am absolutely fine with being #SeriouslyAnnoying. And I’m

with Greta.”

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Figure 2.

Caption:

This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @getnorthern made on March 16, which

reads, “Profile update. #SeriouslyAnnoying.” In screenshot of their bio, we see that they have

made their URL: “seriouslyannoying.gov.”

Figure 3.

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Caption:

This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by username “ANNETTE KELLY

#NHSBlueheart #SeriouslyAnnoying” made on March 18, which reads, “Is Greta Thunberg

trolling Priti Patel over the Policing Bill? <3<3.” The tweet includes a link to an MSN.com

article of the same title, “Is Greta Thunberg trolling Priti Patel over the Policing Bill?”

Figure 4.

Caption:

This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @GeorgetaGavril1 made on March 16,

which reads, “I know it doesn’t make any difference, but this is my own form of protest against

the vote in the UK House of Commons in favor of the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill.

#SeriouslyAnnoying.” The tweet includes a graphic image with the hashtag

#SERIOUSLYANNOYING in large, capitalized white letters against a dark blue background.

Surrounding the text box is a colorful floral pattern.

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Figure 5.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @LloydHardy made on May

12, which reads, “What do you think 10 Downing Street will do when WE MARCH on the 23rd

June against the #ToryDictatorship? This is what we are doing [pointing hand emoji] Being

#SeriouslyAnnoying.” The tweet includes an image of a graphic announcement for a “UK wide

protest, 12 cities, 5 days.”

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Figure 6.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @SwinSuffragette made on

March 17, which reads, “#OTD in 1877 suffragette Edith Bessie New was born in #Swindon.

Arrested and imprisoned multiple times for protesting for votes for women. She was

#SeriouslyAnnoying and her perseverance and determination was inspiring.” The tweet includes

a newspaper image of Edith New being held by police. The title is cut off, but we can see part of

it: “Chained suffragettes attack…”

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Figure 7.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @GregBlackmanArt made on

March 17, which reads, “How long until you get 10 years for art that some find

#SeriouslyAnnoying? Fuck the #PoliceBill.” The tweet includes a violent, illustrated image of a

white man in a police uniform being punched in the face by a white fist. The police officer’s

helmet appears to be flying off and there is red blood spurting out from where the fist is making

contact with the nose and cheek.

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Figure 8.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @TollytB made on March 16,

which reads, “Bernie is #SeriouslyAnnoying.” The tweet includes a photograph of Bernie

Sanders sitting in a folding chair with legs and arms crossed in front of him. There are British

flags behind him. This image of Sanders had been circulating across diverse contexts as a meme

prior to the #SeriouslyAnnoying hashtag.

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Figure 9.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by @MarcusRomer made on

March 17, which reads, “I am going to continue to make work and be #SeriouslyAnnoying.” The

tweet includes a comic, presumably by the author, with the title, “10-year sentence for causing

“serious annoyance.” The comic depicts a group of conservative UK politicians including Priti

Patel in a small prison cell. Patel holds paper that reads, “Policing Bill.” Boris Johnson’s word

bubble says, “We didn’t think that through…”

180

Figure 10.

Caption: This screenshot taken by the author captures a tweet by username “Rainbow Warrior <3

#JOHNSONOUT #GTTO #FBPE” made on March 21, which reads, “Here’s the VIPetition to

protect single person protests if they are “seriously annoying” / Imagine never hearing from

@GretaThunberg! / #ProtectEveryone GO! [nature emojis] #intlforestsday

#worlddownsyndromeday #oddsocks #climateaction petition.parliament.uk/petitions/5788…”

The tweet includes the same image that Thunberg tweeted that day of her own solo protest in

front of the Swedish parliament.

181

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