POOR METAPHORS: HOW LANGUAGE MAKES, AND HOW ANALYZING POPULAR STEREOTYPES CAN CHALLENGE, SOCIAL ATTITUDES THAT QUESTION THE VALUE OF THE ECONOMICALLY OPPRESSED IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

This rhetorical project analyzes the historical and contemporary prevalence of some of the popular metaphors that have come to characterize recipients of government assistance programs such as food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. By synthesizing the metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson with the sociological concepts of doxa, habitus, and heretical discourse posited by Pierre Bourdieu, this project not only spotlights these negative metaphors but also offers ways of disrupting their tacit influence over people’s perceptions, which otherwise are in danger of reproducing themselves. The metaphors discussed seek to reduce the poor on government assistance to the level of parasites, animals, and sinner criminals. In the American political landscape of the latter half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century, these rhetorical attacks have become more frequent, and a good reason for this increase in frequency has to do with an anthropological theoretical framework known as the “culture of poverty,” which many agree was an institutionalized effort to blame the victims of poverty for their own oppression. However, despite the overall failure of the War on Poverty to lift all Americans into prosperity, some of the ideas that flourished during the late 1960s were acts of heretical discourse and can be adapted to help those on government assistance today challenge the assumptions that the wider society holds regarding the poor. Heretical discourse can be an effective way of enhancing democratic engagement in a given population, with the ultimate aim of challenging stereotypes by questioning the metaphors that undergird them.