Death is Violent: Not-Violent Sit-ins and Embodiments of Victimhood in Anti-Police Protest Rhetorics

Abstract

Following the mass protests of 2020, awareness of the systemic nature of police violence in the United States has increased dramatically. However, much of this work remains to be finished, as is seen in the current Stop Cop City protests to prevent the construction of a militarized police training complex in Atlanta. In this article, I examine social media representations of a Stop Cop City sit-in following the police killing of an activist named Tortuguita to gain a deeper understanding of the rhetorical functions of embodied portrayals of victims of police brutality. Current research finds that protesters perform nonviolence to emphasize police violence in contrast to victims’ innocence (O’Rourke; Meckfessel; Goldberg). To extend this conversation, I utilize qualitative coding and employ feminist rhetorical criticism alongside theories of body rhetoric to bring to light how these protests disrupt the hegemony of militarized policing. In particular, Sonja Foss’s method of feminist criticism and Judith Butler’s theories of nonviolence as a rhetorical practice inform this work. By juxtaposing incongruities between peaceful protesters and violent police, rearticulating victimhood and symbolic death, and enacting their right to protest the police, Stop Cop City protesters reframe the narrative surrounding Tortuguita’s death and militarized policing at large. I argue that embodiments of victims of police brutality utilize performances of victimhood and the interplay between violence and nonviolence to disrupt the normalization of police brutality. These findings suggest how embodiments of (non)violence can work as a rhetorical strategy to disrupt established hegemonies.