Ironic Confrontation as a Mode of Resistance: The Homeland Security T-Shirt at the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests

Abstract:In August 2016 Standing Rock Sioux activists began to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline; by the end of the year, thousands of Native and non-Native activists had joined Sioux tribal members to create one of the largest and most sustained protests in recent memory. Throughout the many images that circulated from Standing Rock, a constant form of embodied rhetoric used by activists was the graphic T-shirt. One of these tees, the Homeland Security shirt, has the words "Homeland Security" emblazoned above an image of Geronimo with three fellow Apache warriors and the words "Fighting Terrorism since 1492" located below the photograph. The Homeland Security shirt is a site of understanding the way irony and confrontation—specifically, a wearable, visual form of rhetoric—may be used as a form of critique and resistance. Through a textual analysis of the T-shirt and the discourse surrounding it, this essay demonstrates how the shirt ironically appropriates the dominant discourse and critiques the status quo using a confrontational tone.