“Wise Angers: Gen-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 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 IRB-approved datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory to identify patterns in the posts and then read the patterns through Black feminist theories of racialized anger norms (Lorde, hooks, Cooper, Judd, Collins) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Dingo). Ultimately, I develop a theory of what I call their “digital rhetorics of feminist rage” to help scholars understand this paradigmatic shift in the positive rhetoric of female anger, spearheaded by young women activists from Generation Z.

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Access the published dissertation here.