A Study On Hidden Figures From The Perspective Of Feminist Rhetorical Criticism

Hidden Figures,directed by Theodore Melfi,is an American biographical drama film that tells the story of three black women fighting against sexism,racism and classism.It is rich in feminist ideas and has important realistic significance.Since its release,Hidden Figures has received extensive attention from scholars at home and abroad.Current studies are conducted mainly from the perspectives of sociolinguistics,narratology and film criticism.Few scholars have studied this film from the perspective of rhetorical criticism.Feminist rhetorical criticism is an important critical model in western rhetoric,aiming to reveal various discrimination and oppression in society and advance the positions of women and other marginalized groups.Operated flexibly,it allows critics to acknowledge and explore a wider range of legitimate forms of communication and has no fixed theoretical framework.Therefore,based on theories related to feminist rhetorical criticism,this research constructs an FIR model that combines Mary Daly’s Foreground Theory,Sonja K.Foss and Karen A.Foss’ Invitational Rhetoric and bell hooks’ Representation Theory to interpret Hidden Figures at verbal and nonverbal levels,uncovering how black female characters are oppressed and how they resist the oppression in the film.The study found that,first,the oppressive condition of black female characters in the film is mainly constructed through four verbal rhetorical strategies from Foreground Theory: voice silencing,image fixing,problem ignoring and elementary terms.Second,black female characters use invitational strategies and representational strategies to resist gender discrimination,racial discrimination and class discrimination in the film.Invitational strategies include desire approaching,perspective reframing and commitment enacting.Among them,desire approaching and perspective reframing are verbal strategies,and commitment enacting is a behavioral strategy.As visual strategies,representations help black female characters break stereotypes and show different possibilities through appearance,gaze,image,manner and other visual symbols.This thesis applies an FIR feminist rhetorical model to the study of Hidden Figures,which helps to deepen audiences’ understanding of the film,explores a new approach to the research on films from the perspective of feminist rhetorical criticism,and provides some useful suggestions and references for further research.