Body Rhetoric

Definition: a placement or deployment of the body that uses one or more rhetorical strategies (ethos, pathos, or logos) to persuade or demonstrate a point. In protest, body rhetoric often involves occupying public spaces.

Example: sit-in participants use a passive posture (sitting rather than standing, which places them lower than law enforcement or other authorities) to emphasize the non-violent or passive nature of their protest activity, as well as their determination not to be moved (since a person is less mobile when seated than when standing).

Sit-in protesting anti-homeless policies.
Image credit: Darcy,  Alex. "Resisting the Sit-Lie Ban and Business Owners in Downtown Monterey." Santa Cruz IMC. Web. 26 January 2016.

From the text: 
Haiman deals with the question of whether body rhetoric is an exercise of free speech or a form of physical coercion (23). He explains that "The United States Supreme Court, in its latest dealings with the “body rhetoric” issue in Cox V.  Louisiana has attempted, as we noted earlier, to fashion a distinction between “Pure speech” and “conduct” such as patrolling, picketing, or marching, which may be the vehicle for speech but is not, according to Justice Goldbergs’s majority opinion entitled to so wide a range of  constitutional protections of speech itself" (24). Haiman goes on to add that the 'opinion may return to haunt the court as having enunciated a distinction impossible to maintain'" (24).

Works Cited:
Haiman, Franklyn S. "Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations." Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest. Browne, Stephen Howard, and Charles E. Morris III, eds. State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2013.