Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric

Social media are increasingly important in protest movements for communication and organization. As such, scholars should consider these ephemeral messages as a tool for understanding such movements’ rhetoric. This article draws on Kjeldsen’s method for the critique of visual political rhetoric and adds consideration of intertextuality, synecdoche, and metaphor to demonstrate a method for the rhetorical analysis and a critique of Internet memes as visual, political rhetoric. The Pepper Spray Cop meme arising from Occupy Wall Street is presented as a case-study example. The article considers the centrality of the intertextual nature of memes as a unique form of visual rhetoric in activist contexts and contributes to the literature on user-generated and activist rhetoric.