Cancel culture: posthuman hauntologies in digital rhetoric and the latent values of virtual community networks

This study explores how modern epideictic practices enact latent community values by analyzing modern call-out culture, a form of public shaming that aims to hold individuals responsible for perceived politically incorrect behavior via social media, and cancel culture, a boycott of such behavior and a variant of call-out culture. As a result, this thesis is mainly concerned with the capacity of words, iterated within the archive of social media, to haunt us—both culturally and informatically. Through hauntology, this study hopes to understand a modern discourse community that is bound by an epideictic framework that specializes in the deconstruction of the individual’s ethos via the constant demonization and incitement of past, current, and possible social media expressions. The primary goal of this study is to understand how these practices function within a capitalistic framework and mirror the performativity of capital by reducing affective human interactions to that of a transaction.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Author dc:creator

• Hooks, Austin M

Contributors dc:contributor

• Palmer, Heather
• Hunter, Rik; Matthew, Guy
• College of Arts and Sciences

• Rhetoric
• Social media

Licence

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English, eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholar.utc.edu/theses/669

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-1835