Unruly arguments: the body rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation.

• Author: DeLuca, Kevin Michael

To save old growth forest, an Earth First! activist sits on a platform suspended 180 feet up in a redwood. Protester and platform are dwarfed by the ancient giant. Deep in the woods, a blue-capped, smiling, bearded head pokes up out of a logging road. The rest of the person is buried in the road. This attempt to stop logging by blockading the road extends the meaning of the term passive resistance.

To protest governmental and corporate policy with regards to AIDS research, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) activists chain their bodies to the White House gates and conduct kiss-ins in public spaces. ACT UP occupies St. Patrick's Cathedral and interrupts Mass with a "die-in. "Police carry out the bodies of 134 "dead" demonstrators. Together, healthy bodies, emaciated bodies, and wheelchair-bound bodies stop traffic on Wall Street. Queer Nation activists "sit-in" Cracker Barrel restaurants to protest employment policies that discriminate against them for failing to practice "normal" values. They invade straight bars and shopping malls to kiss and otherwise display gay sexual identity.

These contemporary activist groups, whether termed new social movements or postmodern social movements, are particularly notable for three reasons. They reject traditional organizational structures while forming radically democratic disorganizations. They neglect conventional legislative and material goals while practicing the powers of naming, worldview framing, and identity-making. Finally, and most significantly for this essay, they slight formal modes of public argument while performing unorthodox political tactics that highlight bodies as resources for argumentation and advocacy.

In terms of their stance towards organizational form, Earth First! is exemplary. It is an anti-hierarchical disorganization with no official leaders, no national headquarters, no membership lists, no dues, no board of directors, and no tax-exempt status (Setterberg, 1995, p. 70; Kane, 1987, p. 100). This was a conscious decision, as Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman explains: "We felt that if we took on the organization of the industrial state, we would soon accept their anthropocentric paradigm, much as Audubon and the Sierra Club already had" (1991, p. 21). ACT UP and other groups are similarly radically democratic and decentralized. AIDS activist and writer David Feinberg's description of meetings is revealing: "ACT UP has no leaders. Meetings are run according to Roberta's Rules of Order and are democratic to the point of near anarchy. The facilitator's role is to try to allow as full a discussion as possible without letting things slide into complete chaos, and to lower the level of vituperative and personal aggrievement to an acceptable level" (1994, p. 10; for descriptions of Queer Nation's designed disorganization, see Cunningham, 1992, Berlant and Freeman, 1993).

Typical of these groups, ACT UP's aims are neither limited to nor centered on the conventional goals of electoral, legislative, legal, and material gains. As Sean Strub, founder and editor of the AIDS magazine POZ explains,

Someone 25 years old, gay or straight, with AIDS or not, has a different view of their doctor than they would have 10 years ago. There's a reason ACT UP never incorporated, never sought to build a staff. The idea was not to build an institution with a budget and a bureaucracy. The objective was to change people's relationship to the epidemic and the health care system in general, to make us all players. To analyze its impact, don't look at how many people show up at ACT UP's meetings. Look at how many people took ACT UP's values into their lives (quoted in Schoofs, 1997, pp. 42,44).

These groups, then, are eschewing conventional goals in favor of contesting social norms, deconstructing the established naming of the world, and suggesting the possibilities of alternative worlds.

In performing these goals, Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation are practicing a form of argumentation that is an important manifestation of what has become known as constitutive rhetoric: the mobilization of signs, images, and discourses for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures. (1) For all of these groups, formal public address and argumentation are not primary practices, as denoted by the absence of the eloquent orator of Earth First! or ACT UP. (2) Instead, these activist groups practice an alternative image politics, performing image events designed for mass media dissemination. Often, image events revolve around images of bodies-vulnerable bodies, dangerous bodies, taboo bodies, ludicrous bodies, transfigured bodies. These political bodies constitute a nascent body rhetoric that deploys bodies as a pivotal resource for the crucial practice of public argumentation. (3) In considering the use of bodies by these groups as argument, it is important to consider such usage as in part an adaptation to the unique possibilities and constraints of television, the de facto national public forum of the United States at the close of the 20th Century. Unable to buy time like corporations and mainstream political parties do, groups such as Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation "buy" air time through using their bodies to create compelling images that attract media attention. Even when they have the media's eye, however, these groups options remain severely restricted. First, the protocols of sound bite journalism that dominate commercial news suggest that most issues will receive only precious seconds and that a few minutes are an eternity. Hardly the time to practice the methods of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Second, since these groups do not own their time, they know neither if they will be allowed to speak nor for how long. In addition, as radical groups questioning societal orthodoxies, they can expect news organizations to frame them negatively as disrupters of the social order (Gitlin, 1980; Parenti, 1993). These groups are in hostile territory with little control. What they do have some control over, however, is the presentation of their bodies in the image events that attract media attention. Their bodies, then, become not merely flags to attract attention for the argument but the site and substance of the argument itself.

The aim of this essay is to explore the power and possibilities of bodies in public argumentation. After briefly chronicling the relative neglect of the body in criticism of social movement protests, I will perform close readings of the bodies in the performances of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation. The purpose of this analysis is not to valorize these groups or to privilege body rhetoric, but, rather, to suggest that we must account for their bodies in order to understand the force of these groups' protests, for Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation have challenged and changed the meanings of the world not through good reasons but through vulnerable bodies, not through rational arguments but through bodies at risk .

THE ARGUMENTATIVE FORCE OF UNRULY BODIES

Although there is beginning to be some attention to the argumentative and rhetorical potential of images, (4) bodies remain virtually invisible. Even when the tumultuous street politics of the 1960s and the early 1970s forced rhetorical critics to look beyond the boundaries of conventional politics and formal argumentation and consider the implications of extra-linguistic confrontational activities, the scope was limited and bodies escaped sustained attention. (5) As Brant Short points out, "Although critics acknowledged the rhetorical aspects of confrontation, protest, and agitation, these studies suggest that theoretical accounts of seemingly non-rational discourse remained linked to traditional notions of logic, rationality, and artistic proofs" (1991, p. 173). Contrary to this perspective, I propose that Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation's tactics are arguments in their own right and that their bodies are central to the force of their arguments.

To suggest that bodies and images of bodies argue is controversial and defies the traditional delimitation of argumentation as linguistic. Even those sympathetic to the argumentative force of body images hesitate.

Celeste Condit's discussion (1990, pp. 79-95) of fetus images is illustrative of the hesitation yet demonstrative of the argumentative force of bodies. In a discussion of the role of images of fetuses in the public debate over abortion, Condit offers a nuanced account of the force of images in public argument. Although Condit starts by granting that images can replace narratives and offer a form of grounding, she asserts the primacy of words, contending that the power of images is dependent on their translation into verbal meanings (1990, p. 81). As Condit shouts, "Without verbal commentary, pictures DO NOT ARGUE propositions" (1990, p. 85; see also pp. 81, 86, 87, 88, 90). Despite such protestations, Condit's own argument remains conflicted. First, Condit admits that images can provide general substance for a ground (1990, pp. 81, 85, 91). In Condit's reading of the fetus images of the pro-Life movement, she asserts that "the pro-Life pictures bring us a weighty set of grounds and that those grounds substantiate the claim that fetuses are important and valuable and ought to be protected" (1990, p. 91). Second, Condit seems to be subtly stretching the bounds of public argument and tacitly suggesting that these fetus images do argue. For instance, Condit argues that images offer "a different kind of understanding" (1990, p. 81) and, in referring to images, Condit writes "like any other form of argument" (1990, p. 81). Most explicitly, Condit later declares, "I believe that the pictures argue forcefully for the substance and value of the fetus" (1990, p. 91). Finally, belying her earlier assertions privileging verbal commentary, Condit does not argue that the pro-Life...