Cancel Culture Rhetoric and Moral Conflict in Contemporary Democratic Societies

Introduction

In 2021, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the influential conservative agenda-setting group that hosts a massive annual conference, entitled their gathering “America Uncanceled.” After the conference, CPAC spun this topic off into a podcast, indicating that it deeply resonates with their political advocacy. Despite CPAC’s stated commitment to free speech, they removed a scheduled speaker from the conference’s 2021 lineup after their past antisemitic comments emerged. Even the stalwart conservative network Fox News fired a writer when homophobic, racist, and sexist comments came to light (Romano, 2021). Conservatives who rail against the evils of cancel culture seem to recognize the need to hold public figures accountable for offensive statements. Yet, the gulf between conservative and liberal views on what actions or statements deserve consequences and what cancel culture even is, stretches wide (Vogels et al., 2021).

Instead of adjudicating the morality of removing speakers and weighing the severity of their transgressions, I use the example of CPAC to show the prominence of cancel culture in political disputes in the United States. Cancel culture has become a key language for moral conflict between political parties. It features in discussions about sexual misconduct, the regulation of social media content, popular culture, corporate sponsorship of events, taking down Confederate statues, and the impeachment of former presidents. It is a term tossed around in think pieces on political communication, the state of party politics, and corporate reputation management. While a variety of scholars have attempted to measure the existence of cancel culture and its impacts (Bouvier, 2020; Bouvier & Machin, 2021; Norris, 2021), this article is interested in its linguistic purchase. Rather than resolving debates about whether cancel culture exists, its impacts, and its importance, I argue that the rhetoric of canceling is a prominent way to talk about moral conflict. Examining how strategic actors use claiming to be canceled as a moralizing tool is of utmost importance in political communication. Identifying cancel culture as a rhetorical strategy takes seriously that it is invoked for persuasive effect to resonate with particular audiences.

To explore the use of cancel culture rhetoric, I conducted a thematic rhetorical analysis of two prominent figures who claimed to be canceled in 2020 and 2021: Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. While these individuals navigate two different political contexts and take divergent political debates as their primary topics, their rhetoric has striking similarities, indicating the power of claiming to be canceled for character work. After developing a rhetorical theory of character work that extends scholarship by sociologist Jasper (2018) and on work regarding image repair by W L. Benoit (1995), this article argues that claiming to be canceled is an effective credibility-building maneuver in the contemporary, polarized political system that reduces the offensiveness of the act or statement that led to the alleged cancelation in the first place. Drawing insights from the rhetoric of Hawley and Rowling, claiming to be canceled allows a speaker to chart a middle course between empowerment and disempowerment while identifying a transcendent context to take a stand against a moral ill. Likewise, it crafts a moment of urgency wherein the speaker and their audience can relate, prompting a moralizing call to action. In short, the invocation of cancel culture in discourse facilitates storytelling where character work can occur in the service of image repair. Primarily, claiming to be canceled enacts a variety of Benoit’s established image repair sub-strategies related to reducing offensiveness. I make this argument with the goal of bringing together scholarship on character work and image repair to help scholars better understand the rhetoric of cancel culture. This case also illuminates how persuaders shift their rhetorical personae to engage in moral conflict more effectively.

Cancel Culture, Moral Conflict, and Character Work

The first step in exploring the rhetorical power of claiming to be canceled is to determine exactly what cancel culture is. Most simply, canceling involves diminishing the reputation of a person or entity based in behavior perceived to be offensive to someone (Nierman, 2023). Yet, speakers invoking cancel culture clearly mean different things by the term. In fact, in the United States, there are divergent views of cancel culture. Some see canceling as a form of accountability for those in power, made necessary by decades of inequality along a variety of axes. By contrast, those critical of its role in society see it as a form of censorship and assert its problematic nature (Brownlee, 2021; Mishan, 2020; Romano, 2021; Vogels et al., 2021). As professor of linguistics Nicole Holliday notes, “cancel culture” has been subject to “semantic bleaching,” which means that the words have been evacuated of their meaning (qtd. in Kurtzleben, 2021).

At its core, cancel culture is related to accountability. Holliday defines it as a “cultural boycott” (qtd. in Kurtzleben, 2021). Cancel culture, at least historically, has been wielded by those without access to traditional forms of political power (Clark, 2020). Linguistics scholar Anne Charity Hudley describes the similarities like this:

When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we’re not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. . . . ‘I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.’ (qtd. in Romano, 2021)

In short, the contemporary usage of cancel culture is driven by the attention economy and is based in social media’s power to shape the navigation of blame and accountability. Promoting accountability while protecting free speech is a central moral tension in today’s democratic society. Cancel culture anxiously occupies this aspect of social life.

Yet, insofar as communication constitutes our realities, to study cancel culture’s role in moral politics requires taking seriously how it is invoked in political discourse. As such, this article investigates using cancel culture as a rhetorical strategy. To say that claiming to be canceled is a rhetorical strategy means that speakers use it as a strategic message to influence others. So, rather than debating the implications of different definitions of canceling, this essay explores how speakers use canceling rhetorically. Ng (2022) divides her investigation of cancel culture into “cancel practices” and “cancel discourses.” The latter involve “discussions and commentary about cancel practices and their aftermath” (p. 5). Thus, this essay analyzes cancel discourses from a rhetorical perspective. Rhetoric is concerned with the adaptation of elements, including language, appeals, and arguments to shape a message that resonates with an audience. Likewise, in line with rhetorical critics, I define persuasion broadly, including such maneuvers as calling audiences to action, inviting identification, and reframing events, as rhetorical goals. In a society rife with polarization, opposing sides may use different rhetorical appeals for audiences who hold very different values and have different assumptions about the world. As such, it is worth noting that most (although certainly not all) claims to have been canceled emanate from those on the American political right who, in line with a 2021 Pew Research Study (Vogels et al., 2021), are far more likely to see cancel culture as unfair censorship as opposed to accountability. Indeed, in moral conflict, participants lack shared frameworks to adjudicate differences (Freeman et al., 1992).

Rhetorical eloquence can be an effective response to moral conflict that features divergent worldviews (Freeman et al., 1992, p. 317). Freeman et al. (1992) defined rhetorical eloquence as “rigorous demonstrations that one’s position properly meets the standards of good knowledge and appropriate action” (p. 317). Even so, they acknowledged that the standards for eloquence vary among diverging worldviews. They argued that in those situations where persuasion is impossible, transcendent eloquence is required, which obliges interlocutors to suspend judgment and engage in philosophical discourse that dialogically compares positions and explores the critical role of power that underlies them (Freeman et al., 1992). These rhetorical actions facilitate transcending moral conflict for social good. This is an ambitious (although meritorious) goal indeed when much moral conflict in society is cast in the rhetoric of moral rage over social media (Bouvier and Machin, 2021). More commonly, it seems that public figures do not in fact use rhetoric to transcend moral conflict, but instead use the rhetorical strategies of image repair to make themselves appear moral to atone for past wrongs and appeal to audiences (Len-Ríos et al., 2015).

In my investigation of public figures arguing that they have been canceled, the claim of cancellation positions the speaker in a relevant political context for the audience. I will elaborate on this claim below, but for the time being, I argue that claiming to be canceled is a form of “character work” (Jasper et al., 2018, 2020). Character work, as Jasper et al. (2018) explain entails “efforts to shape the reputations of strategic players into familiar types of protagonists” (p. 114). These protagonists include heroes, victims, villains, and minions (Jasper et al., 2018). Character work is embedded in narratives that help social movements achieve goals for change. Because character work is done by strategic players to actively shape the public perception of social movement actors, it must be a deeply rhetorical process. Yet, strategic players face difficult tradeoffs in navigating the tension between these protagonist personae. While casting oneself as a righteous hero can be powerful, demonstrating existing weakness can also rally listeners to the cause to help. Thus, many activists attempt to strike a balance between appearing to be the victim and the hero.

The scholarship on character work, however, offers few clues as to how strategic actors can transform themselves from victims to heroes, outside of the vague suggestion that they use narrative, the heart of all character work. But fundamentally, this must persuasively occur in the eyes of the audience who adjudicates the reputation of a public figure. Work on image repair strategies in strategic communication can help explain how this shift takes place. As W. L. Benoit (1995) maintains, reputational attacks are serious matters. People feel compelled to explain, defend, and justify their actions when it seems their good name is in danger (p. 2). This is because a good reputation is often required to be successful at influencing others, a hallmark of both political power and interpersonal relationships (W. L. Benoit, 1995, p. 69). Image repair and its accompanying strategies have been studied across a variety of domains from corporate communication to sports and entertainment and politics. W. L. Benoit (1995) provided a typology of a variety of strategies that strategic communicators can use to repair their images that stretch from denying involvement in an offensive act, evading responsibility, reducing the offense attached to the act, engaging in corrective action, and asking for forgiveness. A 2017 meta-analysis found corrective action to be the most successful strategy, with denial being the least successful, although most used (Arendt et al., 2017).

On a broader level, I argue that image repair strategies can facilitate the shifting personae required for character work. More specifically, I argue that claiming to be canceled is a micro image repair strategy that seeks to reduce the offensiveness of a transgression. In W. L. Benoit’s (1995) theory, reducing offensiveness encompasses a variety of sub-strategies that include bolstering, or strengthening a positive association with the actor and minimizing the negative feelings. This often includes forwarding claims about one’s moral character (Len-Ríos et al., 2015). Reducing offensiveness also contains differentiation and transcendence, both of which entail the actor manipulating the context in which the offensive act is understood to either make it seem “less bad” or “more good.” Unlike in transcendent eloquence, here, transcendence refers to the shifting context of the moral wrong, not transcending the moral conflict itself. To reduce offensiveness, a speaker can also attack the accuser and compensate those impacted (pp. 73–74). Recent scholarship on image repair suggests that attacking the accuser is common in polarized situations like presidential debates and was a favored tactic of former President Trump, especially with the goal of deflecting attention away from the original transgression (W. Benoit 2017; W. L. Benoit 2018). I will show that claiming to be canceled is a contextual tactic that fits under the image repair category of reducing offensiveness. Its rhetorical power lies in its ability to blend several of the sub-strategies including transcendence, bolstering, and attacking accusers. Claiming to be canceled as an image repair strategy is well-suited to achieving the balance required between victims and heroes. And, it prepares the rhetor to participate in moral conflict by bolstering their own positive image and allowing occupation of a moral high ground.

With this theoretical groundwork laid, I conducted a thematic rhetorical analysis of Hawley and Rowling’s rhetoric. I used emergent design to select these texts for analysis. With the goal of studying those who claimed to be canceled, I gathered recent texts fitting that description in August 2021 when beginning this research. Given that I wanted to study people talking about their cancelations, controversies surrounding Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and the MLB All Star Game news events in spring and summer 2021 would not count. Using this approach undoubtedly limited my possibilities to high-profile public figures with platforms to make statements on their cancelations. While I gathered many examples of public figures claiming to be canceled, people who included horse trainer Bob Baffert, and former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, most examples included oblique mentions or quick notes about cancelation. To truly understand the rhetorical dynamics of claiming to be canceled, I needed extended discussions of cancelation and its impact for analysis. Texts that met these requirements included Hawley’s 2021 New York Post article and Rowling’s 2020 blog post, rich texts full of character work. I selected these two because they facilitated exploration of different contexts including U.S. electoral politics and social media and hot button gender issues. From there, I analyzed the texts, paying keen attention to moments where the actors wrote about the impact of cancelation on their lives, the social fabric, and their readers and supporters. On a broad level, I attempted to answer the question “how is claiming to be canceled functioning persuasively for these figures?” The findings represent an exploratory discussion of how claiming to be canceled facilitates persuasion via character work. I do not assert that all claims to cancelation function in this way, but I offer these conclusions to begin theorizing the rhetorical impact of cancelation. Likewise, given that the research design led me to choose high-profile public figures, their claims to cancelation need to be explored critically given their privilege and resources. The conclusion discusses these issues in more detail.

The article’s next section investigates the rhetoric of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley to explore how the rhetoric of being canceled entails character work that navigates the tension between empowerment and disempowerment.

“The Muzzling of America”: Hawley Claims to be Canceled

Elected to the Senate in November 2018, Josh Hawley represents Missouri. A resolute religious conservative, Hawley consistently allied with former President Trump, who had endorsed him in a crowded primary in his midwestern state. Hawley was also the first senator to announce an intention to refuse to certify the 2020 election results. Photographers captured Hawley on January 6 raising a fist to support pro-Trump demonstrators mere hours before they stormed the Capitol. His continued denial of President Joe Biden’s victory and potential role in the deadly riots caused publisher Simon & Schuster to withdraw a book deal for Hawley’s planned The Tyranny of Big Tech (Grady, 2021). In a statement, Simon & Schuster explained they were canceling the publication “after witnessing the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.” “As a publisher,” they wrote, “it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom” (qtd. in Grady, 2021). In response, Hawley penned an op-ed in the conservative New York Post on January 24, 2021, entitled “It’s time to stand up against the muzzling of America.” The piece criticizes cancel culture and identifies Hawley as someone who has been canceled by leftist corporate powers. It represents a powerful form of character work in the moral conflict over free speech.

Primarily, by claiming to have been canceled by Simon and Schuster, Hawley’s op-ed used transcendence, an image repair strategy wherein the speaker changes the context by which the audience understands an act (W. L. Benoit, 1995, p. 77). In claiming that Simon and Schuster had canceled him, Hawley elevated a situation that mostly would have a personal, financial impact to one that required a response from a variety of conservative actors primed to be morally outraged. Hawley (2021) opened the op-ed by noting that his “social credit score” “seems to have taken a nosedive this month.” A social credit score, Hawley explained, is a “corporate import from Communist China, where government and big business monitor every citizen’s social views and statements.” “They’re the latest form of cancel culture in this country,” he explained (Hawley, 2021).

By delving deeper into an explanation of this social credit score, Hawley crafted a compelling moral conflict where his canceled book deal became indicative of discrimination against conservative viewpoints. Thus, this canceling transcended Hawley’s financial interest in book royalties and implicated the very freedom of society. He argued:

Like the old-fashioned kind of credit score, your social credit requires a lot of maintenance. You’ll need to get good grades in school and stay out of trouble with the law. But that’s just the start—you have to earn your right to live in polite society these days. So if you want to get a good job, stay at hotels and be served at restaurants, you will need to do a few other things. You will need to voice the right opinions. You will need to endorse the right ideas. You will need to conform. That’s what the corporate chieftains tell us, anyway. (Hawley, 2021)

So, Hawley used the social credit score to elevate the significance of his claim about his book being canceled. He noted that the publisher canceled the book deal because of his unwillingness to go along with “the cancel culture agenda.” “They tried to reprimand me this month because I didn’t [conform]. On behalf of the voters of my state, I raised a challenge to the presidential electors from Pennsylvania after that state conducted the election in violation of the state constitution,” he wrote (Hawley, 2021). Thus, Hawley began the character work that started to shift his persona to a hero. By using transcendence to create a different context for his book cancellation, Hawley also constituted a moment of urgency. In transcending the immediate financial context, he made the situation something that could call an audience to action via moral outrage (Bouvier and Machin, 2021).

Hawley also displaced any blame from himself to others by identifying a clear enemy. These enemies are those who have the power to cancel others. There are patterns in who Hawley points at. He used labels that include “corporate America,” “Leftist politicians,” a “corporate publishing house,” “tech titans,” “corporate chieftains,” and “corporate monopolies” (Hawley, 2021). Alongside shifting the context, this construction of those who threaten American freedom elevated the significance of Hawley’s cancellation. Moreover, Hawley captured a general anti-business ethos by casting a faceless, powerful entity as his adversary. This move bolstered Hawley’s reputation and attributed positive feelings to himself.

These positive feelings, however, situated Hawley in a disempowered position. After all, who could successfully resist such monopolistic power? Hawley appeared a David, matched up against a Goliath. He constituted an audience of Davids as well. “Everyone knows it can happen to them, so everyone shuts down. The circle of trust narrows,” he noted, referring to cancel culture generally (Hawley, 2021). “A ‘Karen’ who cuts the wrong person off in traffic gets followed home on a livestream and shamed into crying for mercy as her license plate is broadcast to an online horde eager to hound her out of a job,” he narrated a vivid story, using the term for an entitled white woman (Lewis, 2020). This character work made Hawley appear concerned for ordinary citizens, a positive attribute. Moreover, he seemed an ordinary citizen instead of a powerful politician (who would, it might be noted, have the power to regulate big tech firms). Thus, Hawley’s character work shifted him from a disempowered position to a member of the public concerned about the direction of the country. He opened the door for identification among his readers and, as a result, bolstered his reputation for being able to stand up to the feared cancelers.

And yet, lest readers believe the battle against these corporate overlords would be easy, Hawley continued to craft a moment of urgency to fight against them, recognizing the challenges ahead. “It will get worse,” he said. The tech titans have already booted dozens of conservatives off social media, and if they have their way, half the House Republican conference will be expelled from Congress. The corporate titans seem to believe that the only way to get a democracy to their liking is to eliminate all threats to the Democratic Party’s unified control of government” (Hawley, 2021). He then situated these continued long odds in terms that the public could understand, moving once again, from the context of his life in Congress to the concerns of readers. “Your vote may still be yours, but if your party is denied the means to effectively organize by corporate monopolies, it’s not going to win. Your church, well, you can still attend for now, but go to the wrong church and you may not have a job in a few years,” he cautioned (Hawley, 2021). Hawley used the fear of exclusion from social life to constitute his audience.

From there, Hawley shifted his persona again to one more empowered to stand up against the enemies he had constituted. “Here’s the good news,” he explained. “The cancel culture agenda will only succeed if we let it. We need live in fear only if we choose to say nothing. In this time of testing, conservatives must not shrink back. We need to stand up for the right of every American to be heard” (Hawley, 2021). Using “we” to continue the sense of identification he built, Hawley opened an avenue for action and empowered both himself and his audience. “We need to stand up for the basic principles that join all Americans together—the right to speak freely, to debate openly, and to address our differences graciously without fear of being silenced or punished for dissenting views,” he explained, situating action against the enemy that was cancel culture and linking his agenda to American values. The extensive fear appeals throughout the editorial bolstered his strong persona.

Finally, Hawley made sure that his image was repaired by leaving his audience with an image of him in an empowered position. “I for one am not going to back down,” he reassured readers. “My book will be published, and I will continue to represent the people of my state without fear or favor, whatever the left or the corporations say” (Hawley, 2021). Thus, even as readers may doubt Hawley’s ability to confront such powerful forces, he made clear that he would not give up.

In short, Hawley’s cancel culture rhetoric was a powerful image repair maneuver. Claiming to be canceled allowed him to engage in transcendence wherein he made his loss of a book deal not a personal insult but evidence of a corporate cancel culture agenda that required immediate action. Moreover, shifting this context bolstered his own reputation and doing so effectively navigated the tension between being a victim and being a hero. Because canceling required a canceler, using this rhetorical frame allowed Hawley to navigate this tension masterfully in a way that called an audience to identify with him and stand firm in promoting conservative ideals. Yet, it is important to recognize that Hawley’s claim to victim status does not erase his privileged status as a member of Congress with access to the attention economy and fora to publish his thoughts. Critical assessment of character work is necessary, especially as the effects of canceling are typically temporary for those with power or influence (Ng, 2022, p. 60). The irony, of course, is that Hawley mobilized the fear of exclusion (of conservative ideals from technology platforms) to service an exclusionary politics. Indeed, in their opposition to “woke mobs,” conservative commentators shut down voices who sought inclusion in political debates.

As the next section shows, despite different circumstances, when J. K. Rowling claimed to be canceled, her rhetoric facilitates similar character work.

The “Tactics of the Playground”: J. K. Rowling has Been Here Before

Analogous rhetorical moves are at play in J. K. Rowling’s rhetoric stemming from transphobic comments that the Harry Potter author tweeted in June 2020. Rowling’s tweets argue that sex is solely biological and therefore question and dismiss the experiences of transgender people (Gardner, 2022). After her tweets generated significant backlash, she took to her website, where she wrote a lengthy post attempting to explain her thoughts on the issue. Unsurprisingly, this post did not put the issue to rest, and many fans continued to tweet and register their disapproval of her stance. Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson tweeted support for transgender people and distanced themselves from Rowling (Gardner, 2022). My goal in analyzing Rowling’s rhetoric is to identify how her discussion of being canceled facilitates character work in this conflict. As a result, I largely will not engage the substance of her claims about trans people, nor will I refute the misguided claims that she makes.

In her opinion piece on her website, Rowling did not lash out at cancel culture per se, although she claimed to have been canceled. The target of her concern was what she called “new trans activism.” Yet, for Rowling, this type of radical activism led to the things associated with cancel culture—polarization, dismissal, knee-jerk reactions, and social media hate. Much like Hawley and the power of big tech, Rowling saw the conflict over the meaning of biological sex and the boundaries of “woman” as a political group as a central moral conflict for society. Thus, she too used the image repair strategy of transcendence to elevate the significance of this conflict. She also situated the conflict as part of a broader debate over free speech. Indeed, in describing the reasons she was concerned about “the new trans activism,” Rowling (2020) wrote, “as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.” In describing her commitment to free speech, she also noted that she has been publicly canceled before. “I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then,” Rowling wrote (2020), explaining the outrage over a post she had “liked” on Twitter. Thus, Rowling also broadened the context for this particular controversy surrounding her tweets about biological sex into a moral conflict about free speech and free thought that implicated the public understanding of cancel culture.

Rowling clearly identified the enemy in her narrative. She was careful to separate “trans activists” from all transgender people, but pointed to those who are vocal on social media as wielding the weapons of cancel culture. Rowling told a story of social media abuse that intensified throughout summer 2020. While the abuse started “bubbling in my Twitter timeline,” it then “swarmed back into my timeline” and eventually rose to the level of “relentless attack” (Rowling, 2020). Each time, Rowling described the abusers as “trans activists” or simply “activists” (Rowling, 2020). In connecting these activists and their social media abuse to her personal story, Rowling painted them as odious. “Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown,” she remembered, “I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop” (Rowling, 2020). While Rowling’s enemies were not Hawley’s powerful tech companies, Rowling cast them as a vocal mob spewing insults that would be tough for any person to weather.

A great deal of Rowling’s essay was spent bolstering her own reputation as an image repair strategy. Indeed, her statement that she had already been canceled four or five times implied a resilience and strength of character as the essay evidenced her continuing to speak her mind. In addition, Rowling situated her interest in gender, sex, and trans issues in the context of something that any audience would know her to be an expert at—developing characters for fiction. “On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal,” Rowling (2020) stated. Seeking out information on these issues while writing a novel seems designed to reduce the offensiveness of the likes and interactions on Twitter. It perhaps can be seen as research, not activism.

And yet, Rowling also bolstered her character on a personal level, not just a professional one. She shared a personal story about her own experience with domestic violence to emphasize the vulnerability of women to dangerous men:

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching. (Rowling, 2020)

Rowling made clear as she concluded her essay that she was not seeking sympathy, not a “teeny-weeny” violin song (Rowling, 2020). However, sharing this story certainly strategically shifted Rowling’s character. Clearly, she hoped that readers would come to understand why she insisted upon biological sex as a marker of womanhood. This also reminded her audience of the lasting impacts of such abuse, which situated her in a disempowered position against the enemy of misogyny. There are other moments in the essay where she also admitted weakness in this battle. She described herself as “ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media” and noted that she spent some time away from Twitter “because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health” (Rowling, 2020).

Just like Hawley, Rowling constituted an audience of readers to show concerns for ordinary people. Her character work, too, placed her in what could be described as a silent majority. “What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation,” she noted (2020), “was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful, and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people.” Rowling made clear that she was subjected to a host of abuse, but located her views within the majority, even if the majority was not vocal and active on social media. Moreover, she placed the audience she created outside of the specific details of the controversy. “If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists,” she explained (2020). In defining the acronym, she created a context outside of social media squabbles, assuming that many are not versed in the specifics of this issue. Moreover, she made clear that she is amongst a “huge and diverse” group of women being targeted by what she characterized as activists bent on canceling and using “the tactics of the playground.” This latter descriptor is of course, in W. L. Benoit’s (1995) terms, a form of attacking the accuser.

Finally, just like Hawley, Rowling shifted her character to an empowered position. “I knew perfectly well what was going to happen,” she claimed (2020) when she weighed in on these issues on Twitter before noting she had been canceled numerous times before. She expected, she explained, to be targeted on Twitter, to be called abusive names, and for former fans to call for a boycott or even the burning of her books. Despite her clear-eyed vision of the consequences of her actions, she, like Hawley, constituted a moment that required her to stand up for what she believes:

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society. (Rowling, 2020)

Although she did not call an audience to action here as Hawley did, Rowling did note that she stands with others in her continued need to speak her mind about this issue. Moreover, she made clear that this is both a difficult and important time to do so given not only the cancel culture tactics of the Twitter activists, but also what she described as the “most misogynistic period I’ve experienced” (Rowling, 2020). She pointed to former U.S. President Donald Trump joking about committing sexual assault and a general backlash against women. “Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else,” she cautioned (Rowling, 2020). Thus, against these obstacles, Rowling noted that she must take her stand and risk the consequences. Yet, it is important to note that the risk and consequences of such rhetoric are not evenly distributed across society, and Rowling’s financial wealth and fame generally protected her from serious consequences.

In sum, Rowling also used claiming to be canceled as a form of image repair. Indeed, this blog post sought the goals of image repair—offering an explanation, defending, and justifying (W. L. Benoit 1995). Rowling used the affordances of her blog—free from the character limits of Twitter—as the place to do this repair work. Claiming to be canceled allowed her to engage in character work and bolster her reputation to navigate the tension between being seen as a victim and being the hero in the narrative. Indeed, because claiming to be canceled required identifying an enemy doing the canceling (in Rowling’s narrative, it was the “new trans activists”), it primed the strategic actor to tell a story with a compelling context that sets up a moment to act, and thus, shift their character from a victim to a hero.

Cancel Culture and Character Work: Conclusion

Amid two different contexts and surrounding two different social conflicts, Josh Hawley and J. K. Rowling claimed to be canceled to rhetorically undertake character work. Despite differences in the general situation, they deployed similar rhetorical strategies in seeking to repair their images, and claiming to be canceled was a centerpiece in their rhetorical campaigns. Claiming to be canceled, of course, is not unique to Hawley and Rowling. Hundreds of public figures and ordinary people alike have made statements testifying that they have found themselves canceled. Yet, their words provide extensive character work and discussion of cancelation, which makes them rife for analysis of the impact of cancel culture rhetoric. The remainder of this conclusion sets out three lessons for those considering cancel culture and rhetoric in contemporary society.

Primarily, claiming to be canceled is a way to rhetorically navigate moral conflict in a polarized society. It is worth reflecting upon the way this rhetoric constitutes a context within which the strategic actor can operate. Rowling used claiming to be canceled as an indictment of the ease of attack on Twitter. Indeed, her long exegesis on her blog, complete with citations to medical research, differed greatly from most common social media posts. Similarly, Hawley’s cancel rhetoric situated itself within political discourse in the United States. It was also an indictment of the power of big tech companies that (in his opinion) gave credence to liberal viewpoints. Indeed, claiming to be canceled allowed each speaker to inflate the importance of their cause. It took something potentially small and personal (losing a book deal and being attacked on social media) and made it a central moral conflict in society that had large implications for free thought and free speech.

Second, this analysis illustrates the link between the rhetoric of image repair and character work. Claiming to be canceled is a micro strategy for image repair that primarily fits under W. L. Benoit’s (1995) category of reducing offensiveness of the transgression. This rhetoric bolsters the reputation of the speaker by allowing them to position themselves as an underdog taking on a behemoth powerful enough to wield the weapons of cancelation. Moreover, it allows actors to “attack the accuser” (W. L. Benoit, 1995) by crafting an enemy who has done the canceling. Finally, this rhetoric also facilitates the strategy of transcendence by, as I have noted above, shifting the context in which the strategic actor is understood and elevating the importance of their cause. Thus, claiming to be canceled is an image repair strategy that enables the rhetor to do character work. More specifically, it expedites the ability to shift back and forth between the victim and the hero.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, claiming to be canceled as a rhetoric highlights the importance of narrative in strategic communication. Although this is certainly not a groundbreaking insight, it is worth reflecting upon how neatly claiming to be canceled tells a story about who the rhetor is. They become the keeper of some controversial truth, and their opponents have no choice but to cancel them to keep them quiet. In choosing to speak up anyway, they become the hero in a fraught social context full of moral conflict. As Walter Fisher (1984) might say, this story has both fidelity and coherence. It is internally and externally consistent.

And yet, a final note of caution is warranted. As I noted at the outset, cancel culture as a term has been stretched thin and lacks a consistent meaning. One person’s cancel culture is another’s accountability check. Thus, while claiming to be canceled is a powerful rhetorical maneuver that may perform the functions of image repair, seeing its use does not allow the critic to draw any conclusions about the actual power and influence of the rhetor. Indeed, in its original formulation, cancel culture primarily referred to a group of people with limited access to traditional political influence wielding the power of their attention against those they felt had wronged them (Clark, 2020). Claiming to be canceled, however, is not the same thing as suffering real, material consequences for genuine or imagined misdeeds. While research on this is mixed, canceling mostly has done little to upend structures of profit and power in digital capitalism (Thiele, 2021). Those who have utterly and truly been canceled (Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein come to mind) have been convicted of crimes in addition to suffering public condemnation for immoral behavior. Josh Hawley continues to serve in the U.S. Senate and J. K. Rowling is the best-selling living author in the United Kingdom with a net worth of hundreds of millions of pounds (The Sunday Times, 2022). So, audiences for this rhetoric might approach their claims with several grains of salt.

Rhetorical critic Asen (2009) helps scholars identify what those grains of salt might entail. He suggests that in evaluating a rhetor’s claims of exclusion (which is a component of asserting one’s cancellation), the rhetorical critic must assess discourse, ideology, and materiality. In other words, unreflexively accepting assertions of marginalization risks blunting the critical tools in a rhetorician’s arsenal. Instead, he suggests first, examining discourse for the key values it proclaims and assessing whether an advocate undermines or upholds them; second, examining discourse for the markers of social standing; and third, examining whether an advocate expands or restricts discursive space for others (Asen, 2009, p. 282). While claims to cancelation function perhaps more complexly than other assertions of exclusion, Asen’s caution should be considered in both scenarios. Indeed, both Hawley and Rowling display markers of privilege, such as when Rowling notes that she has been canceled several times already. Moreover, their access to platforms for publication (a high-profile blog and the New York Post) indicate contradictions among their claims that they are truly being silenced. Moreover, despite a professed commitment to free speech, especially on Hawley’s part, that commitment only applies to folks speaking against what he sees as a “woke mob.” Thus, Hawley mobilizes fear of exclusion in the service of exclusionary ideals. Both Hawley and Rowling restrict discursive space for competing ideals despite their stated commitment to free speech. Their character work, to be blunt, does not have to be accepted at face value. As Pascale (2019) notes the creation of a victim identity among a dominant group is a marker of authoritarian politics.

And yet, for scholars of image repair, political discourse, and the rhetoric of moral conflict, the character work enabled by cancel discourses cannot be ignored. Simply put, in polarized societies rife with moral conflict, claiming to be canceled is a discursive resource that facilitates image repair and allows a rhetor to shift between victim and hero status in their public narrative.