E. Brooke Phipps

Disinformation, inaccurate information spread intentionally for profit, ideology, or harm is a major public issue and a significant object of study across disciplines However, much scholarship treats “disinformation” as an irritant without recognizing that it often harnesses metanarratives about inequality and identity, and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. For example, counting how many “sockpuppet” accounts contribute to a Twitter hashtag reveals that they do not represent genuine opinions of unique individuals, but does not capture whether they advance cultural narratives about race and gender. Disinformation campaigns are also often mischaracterized as “information warfare” or “psychological operations” and reduced to military-style masculinized logics of conflict and dominance in which “threat” is framed as a matter of “cybersecurity." This leaves out complex dynamics of identity, intersectionality, affect, labor, and material infrastructures. Feminist t...

2019 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The 2017 Women's March on Washington marked a significant moment in contemporary U.S. political history as hundreds of thousands of women gathered on the National Mall in an expression of embodied dissent. Key women's movement groups, Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project, operated as powerful collectives in the time leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the subsequent 2017 Women's March. Their transition from sites of rhetorical secrecy to embracing the strategic publicity of the 2017 Women's March illuminates how ego-function, reversed symbolism, and consciousness raising impact social movements in our digital age. To understand how social movement groups navigate rhetorical secrecy and strategic publicity, this thesis explores how the ego-functional responses of Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project led to the deployment of specific rhetorical tactics to cultivate collective identities. I argue that ...