Knitting Together the Raging Grannies: Perspectives by Incongruity as Seen in the Performative Protest Model
Date
April 2020
Description
The Raging Grannies are a performative protest organization that mobilizes in support of women’s reproductive rights, labor rights, the environmental movement, health care reform, and many more salient issues of today. The group uses a diverse selection of unconventional protest methods in their activism, relying primarily on the authoring and performance of satirical protest songs. This analysis of the written and visual rhetoric used by the Grannies during their performance at the 2017 Women’s March on Madison relies on Kenneth Burke’s perspective by incongruity to explain the carnivalesque approach to activism taken by the group. This framework is traditionally applied to planned incongruities intentionally crafted by the rhetors themselves, but the author posits that unplanned perspectives by incongruity may also be constituted by the audience. Examples of these incongruities are found in the antithesis between the Raging Grannies’ embodied identities as older white women and their raging protest for matters of diversity and inclusion.
Presentation Type
Presentation
Knitting Together the Raging Grannies: Perspectives by Incongruity as Seen in the Performative Protest Model
The Raging Grannies are a performative protest organization that mobilizes in support of women’s reproductive rights, labor rights, the environmental movement, health care reform, and many more salient issues of today. The group uses a diverse selection of unconventional protest methods in their activism, relying primarily on the authoring and performance of satirical protest songs. This analysis of the written and visual rhetoric used by the Grannies during their performance at the 2017 Women’s March on Madison relies on Kenneth Burke’s perspective by incongruity to explain the carnivalesque approach to activism taken by the group. This framework is traditionally applied to planned incongruities intentionally crafted by the rhetors themselves, but the author posits that unplanned perspectives by incongruity may also be constituted by the audience. Examples of these incongruities are found in the antithesis between the Raging Grannies’ embodied identities as older white women and their raging protest for matters of diversity and inclusion.
Comments
This oral presentation is based on an individual research project.