Reclamation & Building Ethos
Ex-con TikTok creators are transparent with their audiences about their past crimes, their wrongdoings, and their experience inside of prison institutions. This page discusses the rhetorical methods used by these TikTokers to rebuild and reclaim their identities, as well as the way they are viewed in society.
Reclamation: Schlosser and Feldman discuss PrisonTok as a method for previously incarcerated women to reestablish their ties with society, and to spread awareness, and prevention in some cases.
Taking Ownership
The following Video, "I Was A Cat Burglar - Then I Went To Prison For 10 Years" is an interview between Ian Bick (host) and Jennifer Gomez (ex-convict, TikTok: jenjengomez2.0). In video, Gomez shares about her life, her upbringing and her crimes involving cat burgalary that ultimately led to her imprisonment. Finally, she shares about her social media growth and the response she has recieved from strangers online. To her surprise, she has found comfort in creating TikToks to storytell and own up to the mistakes of her past. This goes to show that her storytelling abilities have been effective with her audience, and that her efforts in sharing her story are shifting public perceptions and educating people about what it's really like to be convicted for a crime as a woman.
Ethos
Digital creators, and ex-cons in particular establish ethos through storytelling, sharing personal and interesting information with audiences, and building community on TikTok.
Logos
Creators use logos by sharing true dates, photos (like mugshots), and legal facts from their proceedings and sentencing.
Pathos
Pathos is employed at times by ex-con creators on Tiktok, to appeal to audiences and have their story heard. Oftentimes, the public turns their back on people who have fallen into crime or gone through incarceration.
“Broadly, social media norms for self-presentation often involve presenting oneself in a positive light, contributing to a perceived social positivity bias in which positive self-expression and content is more common and receives more interaction from others than negative self-expressions [24], [64], [76]”
- Barta, Kristen, and Nazanin
Andalibi. “Constructing
Authenticity on TikTok: Social
Norms and Social Support on the
‘Fun’ Platform.”
Foss' Feminist Criticism
In Foss' chapter on Feminist Criticism, she describes the criteria that constitute a feminist creator or message. She says, "Other definitions feature the idea of oppression and ways to end it, as does the definition that conceptualizes feminism as the theoretical study of women’s oppression and the strategical and political ways that all of us, building on that theoretical and historical knowledge, can work to end that oppression.”
The TikTok creators who are the subject of this project contribute to this definition, as they break moulds of what society expects from women, and they speak of experiences that only a minority of women have faced, which brings in the element of oppression and alienation that they face as women in this category. To come online and open up about personal experiences and pains of imprisonment, women like Jennifer Gomez are able to build on feminist theory and get audiences thinking about groups that are oppressed in society.
