ABSTRACT
Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, delivered an impassioned 11-minute speech on February 17, 2018, after surviving a school shooting three days prior that killed 17 of her classmates and left at least 17 others injured. With tears streaming down her face, Gonzalez spoke at a gun control rally at the Broward County courthouse, repeating the phrase “We call bullshit!” to refute fallacious arguments Stoneman Douglas students regularly encounter as residents of Florida where gun laws are considered permissive. The image of Gonzalez speaking was remarkable for many reasons related to her content and speaking style. Gonzalez’s shaved head marked her gender performance as non-normative and her light brown skin starkly inverted the white supremacist gun norms she fervently challenged. As in Wells-Barnett’s case, the image of Gonzalez “talking through tears” was “rich with meaning” since “tears were much more acceptable for a proper lady than anger or its cousin, sarcasm.”.
