Gender Ideology, Abortion, and the Web: If No One is Having Sex, Where Do All the Pregnancies Come From?

Anna Martinson

Abstract

In an ‘information society,’ it is important to recognize the connections between information and ideology, and this is true also for resources available on the World Wide Web.  Following Hodge, Kress & Jones (1979), I define ideology as “a set of [partial and particular] ideas involved in the ordering of experience and making sense of the world.”  Critical discourse analysts make the case that ideology is evident through verbal discourse and visual representations. This study is part of a larger research project employing methods adapted from Fairclough (1992) and Herring (2004) to identify ways in which verbal, visual, and hypertextual cues convey information and attitudes towards gender.  Specifically, this study reports on the analysis of 15 websites about abortion.

Preliminary results indicate three main categories of findings:  1) the persistence of incommensurate lexicons describing central concepts – pro-choice sites situate reproductive rights as a subset of human rights while pro-life sites express an attitude of compassion combined with a policy of “without exception, without compromise, without apology”; 2) regardless of stance towards abortion, many of the websites use similar strategies to support their perspective – such as the selective deployment of an evaluative lexicon or only linking to websites that share the same perspective; and 3) also regardless of underlying ideology there is an overall silence about the facts of reproduction. I interpret these findings in light of changing gender ideologies and the enhancement of critical literacy for web users in an information society.

Full Paper [pdf]

About the Author

Anna M. Martinson is a Visiting Scholar with the Rhetoric Department at the University of Minnesota and is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University specializing in gender, discourse and information technology. Her publications have appeared in Extrapolation, the Journal for the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the Journal of Documentation, the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, and New Media & Society.