Maeve Eberhardt (University of Vermont) is giving a talk as part of the MSU Linguistics colloquium at 3pm on Friday, October 11, 2024. (Fun fact: Maeve was lab member Emily Duggan‘s professor when Emily was an undergraduate student!). Linguistics colloquium talks are organized by MSU Linguistics graduate students. For Zoom details, please contact Jess Shepherd, sheph157@msu.edu.
From rights to justice for all: The discourse of abortion in old and new media
The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 (Dobbs v. Jackson) has had a profound impact on the ability to access abortion care across the United States. With the removal of legal protections at the federal level, nearly two dozen individual states swiftly passed legislation that banned abortion within their borders. In this talk, I probe the discourses circulating around and shaping the meaning of abortion in traditional and new media.
I first present the results of a study examining abortion in newspaper coverage directly following the Dobbs decision (Eberhardt, 2023). Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, I show that while the mainstream press maintains a staunch position in favor of Roe, this is rooted in an abstract notion of rights, and obscures structural inequities of gender, race, and class. Furthermore, individuals enacting that right to abortion are deliberately legitimized within a neoliberal set of logics, and constructed as justified in making a ‘responsible’ calculated choice.
I use these findings as a point of entry into the discourse of #abortionrights on the social media platform Instagram (Eberhardt, under review). Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a distinctly different picture within this online space when responding to abortion legislation. Creators use a wide range of semiotic resources to craft engaging, informative, and affectively poignant responses. While #abortionrights on Instagram can reproduce a dominant narrative of white feminism in a similar way to traditional news media, it simultaneously enables the circulation of transgressive messaging, bringing intersectional feminism into sharp focus. Posts are laced with demands for broad acknowledgement that rights do not equal access, that abortion is not something that needs to be legitimized, and that the capacity to act is inequitably distributed across the populace in ways that compound existing structural oppressions. I argue that this is the promise of social media: creators are able to reach a wide audience through invocation of dominant framing (here, a rights-based understanding of abortion), only then to upend that narrative via the democratized space of online platforms. In this way, social media, despite its drawbacks, has the potential to contribute to a larger activist agenda that moves us towards social justice and change.
