What is the origin of oppression? Why do we hear so much about it from some circles, and yet can rarely identify it when it confronts us in our everyday lives? Charlie Manter and I, April Maltz, set out to answer this question within the context of our Honors Seminar, Gender, Sex, Race, and Marginalized Communities. We focused on rhetorically analyzing oppression as it occurs in American society using Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory, which states that our reality is represented through the use of symbols and that it is created by the terministic screens through which we view these symbols and by drawing on Tracy Ore and Marilyn Frye’s theories of oppression. Tracy Ore claims that oppression is institutionalized, and that there are five types of institutional oppression: family, media, education, state and public policy, and economy. The institutional oppression creates the framework for interpersonal and internalized oppression, with interpersonal speaking about actions taken against an individual and internalized referring to the identification with the negative stimuli of the surrounding oppression and absorbing it as self-image even as it is against self-betterment.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric