Wise (Teen) Anger on Twitter: Greta Thunberg Uses “Bio Warfare” to Reshape Oppressive Anger Norms

Abstract

“Bio warfare” describes a digital rhetorical tactic used by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

Notes

1 I thank RR reviewers Hugh Burns and Erika Sparby for their insightful, generous, and kind feedback on this essay. I also send boundless gratitude to my advisor, Jess Enoch, to Matthew Kirschenbaum, and to my brilliant peers and friends who have helped me think about girls’ anger and its circulation through popular and academic discourse.

2 Donald Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, was permanently suspended on January 8, 2021 after Twitter deemed two of his Tweets from the same day in violation of the Glorification of Violence policy. (The official announcement can be found here: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.) When Twitter accounts are suspended, the record of their Tweets is made inaccessible to the public. Thus, I cannot cite the Tweet in its original context. However, a record of the former president’s Tweets, including those I reference, can be viewed at TheTrumpArchive.com.

3 Some may see a connection here between what I describe and what Belinda A. Stillion Southard describes as the suffragists’ “rhetoric of political mimesis.” For more on rhetoric and mimesis, see Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913-1920.

4 Teenage girls are the most sought after “market segment” in the United States (Taft 6).

5 For more on how this pseudo-science has been debunked, see Fine, Saini, and Joel and Vikhanski.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Britt Starr

Britt Starr is a PhD candidate in English (Rhetoric Track) at the University of Maryland with graduate certificates in women’s studies and digital studies. She is interested in the rhetorical processes that enable social transformation and the roles that evolving communication technologies play. Her dissertation explores how teen activists from Generation Z use social media to challenge gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist anger norms that have long made it difficult for young activist women to be heard in public. Britt is the author of “Disturbing White Perfectionism in the Graduate Student Habitus,” published in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, Spring 2021. As Assistant Director of the UMD Academic Writing Program, Britt helped redesign the curriculum and corresponding textbook to better incorporate antiracist and social justice praxis. Britt has won several awards for both her teaching and scholarship, most recently winning a Wylie Dissertation Fellowship Award at the University of Maryland.