Rhetorical Perspectives on Social Movements

The rhetoric of social movements is principally concerned with the exercise of agency in movement struggles--that, is, with what movement actors (and the forces they oppose) say and do to make a difference in the world. If rhetoricians err, it is in the direction of emphasizing planned social change over unplanned social change--the latter a result of structural factors beyond any individual or group's control. Rhetorical perspectives on social movements, whether by self-proclaimed rhetoricians or by social scientists and historians, tend especially to emphasize symbolic agency over the coercive influences of violence and economic power. They tend in general to see humans as capable of making a difference by their choice of words and symbolic actions, even to the point of undoing, or at least reconceiving for societies, what had long been understood to be natural, immutable, inevitable. This extends to taken-for-granted notions of family, race, clan, and nation--of "we the people." It applies also to evils and enemies, problems and causes. All are rhetorical constructions, the stuff of movement ideologies, made real to and for people by acts of persuasion.

By implication, movements as well as the institutions and counter-movements they oppose, are engaged most fundamentally in struggles over meaning. (Stewart, Smith, and Denton, Persuasion and Social Movements, Prospect Heights, IL, 1994.) The social scientists and historians who view movement struggles rhetorically tend to join with self-styled rhetoricians in focusing on the dynamics of meaning-making: how movement actors choose from among the available means of persuasion; how these rhetorical resources change over time; how conflicts between opposing forces get played out symbolically; how symbolically reconstituted realities function to achieve other goals; how they also impel and constrain subsequent rhetorical choices. (Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest, Chicago, 1997)

In their focus on agency, rhetorically oriented movement scholars share the activist's angle of view. It would be hard to imagine a feminist leader, for example, who believed that women's liberation was less a function of feminist rhetoric than of such structural factors as the need for female labor during World War II.