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Platformisation has facilitated the emergence of new rhetorical spaces where activists can creatively structure and present their political statements according to medium-specific affordances. In this article, we examine a group of activists on TikTok who topicalise gender-based violence and gender inequality through multimodal means of communication in short videos. We approached these videos as rhetorical arenas for communicating compelling messages with the aim of appealing to the audience. We used digital ethnography, multimodal discourse analysis, and approaches to the mediality of the body to conduct our investigation and analyses. Our results explicate how affective cues and bodily signals are put to rhetorical and political use in TikTok stories to pursue social change. That is, bodily performances stage interrelational positionings in a visual format, conveying affective evaluations and judgements about the state of the world and forming rhizomatic threads of messages to mobilise support and to affirm identification among the members of the movement.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, Justice explains the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one's normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. The author concludes that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]