International Journal of Linguistics & Communication

Spectacular Girls’ with AK-47s: Radicalism through Image Events of Islamic State
Zoe DuPree Fine

Abstract
The group that has come to be known as Islamic State2 (IS) treats as a primary rhetorical activity “staging of image events for mass media dissemination” (DeLuca, 1999a). They stage these namely, specifically, and strategically in and through online spaces. In this article, the author analyzes how three media image events (DeLuca, 1999a, 1999b) about Islamic State do rhetorical, radical work. The author shows how, through these pieces of online visual rhetoric and through their circulation, “women of Islamic State” identity is rhetorically constructed, how it manifests, how it is discursively mobilized, and how it functions as radical. The artifacts examined are images that appear in news articles about IS, though that were originally posted on social media. The author identifies how these three pieces of visual rhetoric function as image events (Delicath & DeLuca, 2003) and as radical (Žižek, 2002; Žižek, 2009), argues that the rhetorical, radical work of these images and their (re)contextualization manifest and mobilize girls and women of IS identities, and concludes with a discussion of intertextuality as being necessary in future research on communication and terrorism.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijlc.v4n1a1