Anger’s Volumes: Rhetorics of Amplification and Aggregation in #MeToo

Abstract

Building an archive of avowed public engagements with anger in the #MeToo movement, this article lends conceptual specificity to understanding anger regulation through the rhetorical vocabulary of volume. Volume illuminates how anger is rhetorically rendered available for some to mobilize around while simultaneously limiting the emotional expression—and thus the political potential—of others. Specifically, volume illuminates how anger waxes and wanes through public life along raced, gendered, and classed lines that too often elevate the righteous expression of privileged anger while ignoring or silencing the anger of those most marginalized. Two forms of volume regulate public anger: the amplification and diminishment of affective intensity or sound and the aggregation and dispersion of bodies, interests, and collective energies. Volume invites critics to assess how different angers circulate under the heading of a social movement to determine how they can suture collective norms of emotional expression.

Keywords:

• Angry rhetoric
• #MeToo
• pathos
• public emotion
• race
• volume

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Lisa Corrigan, Kristen Hoerl, and the two anonymous reviewers for their meaningful engagement with this piece throughout the revision process. The author is grateful to Atilla Hallsby, Heather Woods, Caitlin Bruce, Michael Lechuga, Zornitsa Keremidchieva, Wendy K. Z. Anderson, and Nicole Hurt for generative discussions and feedback on this project throughout its stages.