Advocacy for Equity: How Two Transnational Feminist Activists Utilize Parrhesiastic Resistance to Champion for Climate Action and Access to Education

Abstract

Parrhesia is the rhetorical act of speaking truth to power even when doing so is risky to the speaker, and has been integral to Western thought and practice ever since it arose alongside democracy and rhetoric and ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. When a parrhesiastes speaks, it is often because some truth value is being violated and the outrage at this violation causes her to speak out. The sense of injustice and the choice to speak out regardless of the risk may be experienced as a privately made decision, but generally reflects a commonly accepted value that is not being enacted, acknowledged or manifested sufficiently. However, because parrhesia is often required for marginalized or silenced people to speak out at all, there is a need to understand how this works so we can both acknowledge the great risks certain speakers take in speaking and show how to enact these moments of resistance to power when that may be the only rhetorical means possible. This paper analyzes the rhetorical agency of two activists as parrhesiastes to encourage climate action and equal access to education across the globe. Specifically, I use a rhetorical situation analysis to analyze two speeches given by Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai to the United Nations when they were both sixteen years old. This paper attempts to tie in transnational feminist theory and social movement studies to study Thunberg's and Yousafzai's sources of persuasion, their use of parrhesia to enhance their message, and their place as activists working across transnational boundaries.