Brandishing Broomsticks and Dumping Dow: Rhetoric of Alternative Media Texts related to Bhopal Gas Tragedy Activism.

My paper is concerned with issues of representation, production and circulation of (alternative) media texts (pictures, video clips, reports, pamphlets, videogames and graffiti), which are used in offline and online protests, and appear on YouTube, newspapers and in the advocacy websites and blogs related to the tragedy. The advocacy movement around the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (BGT) has worked in recent years to align the movement with other related discourses and movements of feminism and environmentalism, organizing protests, and managing information campaigns in innovative ways by transgressing national boundaries and other institutional constraints. The paper aims to study how the rhetoric of the advocacy protests around the BGT as it gets organized and represented by alternative mediations, connects with the larger goals of the movement. Through a textual analysis of alternative media texts and interviews with BGT activists in Bhopal (India), United States and Britain, I argue in this paper that the alternative media texts produced as part of the BGT movement 'are shaped by' and 'shape' the organizational dynamics and movement goals of transnational activists who are participant actors in it. More specifically, undertaking a semiological analysis (Barthes, 2000) of various protest related media texts, I comprehend how BGT activists engage in acts of semiotic contamination (read 'subvertising') of Dow's own advertising campaigns (Human Element) and logo designs to demystify the "myth" of Dow Chemicals as a socially responsible organization. Symbolic performances by women survivors have included brandishing of broomsticks as part of the Jhadoo Maro (Beat Dow with the Broomstick) campaign and selection of monuments/buildings from Dow corporation offices to Gandhi Statues at the Indian Embassy as sites of resistance. These performances, I contend, demonstrate an attempt on their part to move beyond unjust established social boundaries in imaginative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]