Tweets against the stigmatisation of abortion in the US? A critical discourse analysis of a Twitter hashtag #youknowme

Abstract

This thesis examines the discourse of a Twitter hashtag #youknowme. This celebrity-led social media campaign was created in the spring of 2019 as a response to a wave of state-enacted abortion bans. This study is situated within the frameworks of critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics which offer complementary theoretical and practical guidelines for the analysis of relations between language use and ideologies. Data in this thesis consists of 132 tweets which were published on May 16th, a day after the first #youknowme tweet was published. The purpose of this work is to examine initial responses in #youknowme, and more specifically this work focuses on analysing which themes and ideological representations arise from this discourse sample. The data was collected on May 21st in 2019 by utilising a data retrieval software NodeXL Pro, which operates as an expansion on Excel and uses Twitter Search API to retrieve content from Twitter. This work applies Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional model of discourse analysis for the examination of Halliday’s (2004) systems of Theme and Rheme in #youknowme tweets. Thematic structures in the discourse sample are considered to reflect Twitter users’ underlying ideologies of abortion. The analysis of Theme and Rheme indicates that Twitter users positioned various elements into Theme, most notably first-person pronouns. Discourse in #youknowme included personal experiences of abortion and calls for other Twitter users to act for the movement. It therefore represented pro-abortion discourse and related to bodily autonomy which is central to the discourse of reproductive justice advocates. However, it was also found that Twitter users often negated stigmatised assumptions related to abortion, which was not seen effective in combatting abortion stigma. As Lakoff (2014) suggests the most effective way for advocates to start reframing a certain social issue is to begin with words that align with the ideologies of the advocates.