“Does this dick make my rights look bigger?”: Transmittance and transgression of neoliberal feminism on Instagram

Abstract

The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 caused a profound shift in the right to abortion across the United States. With the removal of legal protection at the federal level, many individual states swiftly passed legislation banning abortion within their borders. In the current paper, I apply Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and multimodal techniques to a corpus of posts hashtagged with #abortionrights, to interrogate how messages of abortion rights are mobilized on Instagram. Tagging posts with #abortionrights reaches a wide audience through the invocation of a dominant, rights-based understanding of abortion. This transmits the hegemonic positionality of neoliberal feminism, and simultaneously transgresses dominant messaging by bringing intersectional feminism into sharp focus. In this way, I argue, social media bares its potential to contribute to a larger, activist agenda that moves us towards social justice and change.