Steamed? An Ethnographic Analysis of the Tea Party Movement

ABSTRACT STEAMED? AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT by © Ryan Guy 2011 Master of Arts in Communication Studies California State University, Chico Spring 2011 The following thesis is a critical-rhetorical ethnography of the Tea Party movement. This study follows my own lived experience of joining, assimilating, and performing advocacy as a member of the Tea Party movement. Three research questions were constructed to focus the study on the topics of newcomer assimilation/ socialization, the role of counterpublics in the development of movement discourses, and the rhetorical development of the Tea Party as a social movement. Data collection consisted of ethnographic inquiry for a period of 11 months. During this time, I engaged in direct advocacy as a member of several west-coast regional Tea Party groups. At the conclusion of ethnographic fieldwork, a small number of semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of the Tea Party movement. This triangulation of ethnographic and qualitative methodologies produced a large body of data to be studied. The data analysis process drew on rhetorical methodologies of combining textual fragments, discovered in the field, to invent rhetorical texts representative of the Tea Party movement. These texts were then critiqued using an analytical framework constructed from theoretical perspectives of organizational assimilation and socialization, social movement rhetoric, and theories of the public sphere. Following this analysis implications concerning the problematic nature of the Tea Party's future as a social movement were discussed. Additionally, insights into the current theoretical understandings of enclaved counterpublics are presented. The study concludes with a discussion of limitations and directions for future scholarship.