In an age of #Metoo, Alabama abortion laws, and Brett Kavanagh, issues relating to rape and sexual assault have not only become central to national political dialog, but they have also become more firmly connected to abortion politics and even an emergent acknowledgement of the presence of incest in American lives. This paper examines how social media platforms uniquely contribute to the pairing of abortion politics and sexual assault and incest prevalence, serving as digital space for discussion, expression, and critique of contemporary political and social discourses of rape. In particular, we example how complex or multilayered discourse about rape and abortion frequently appear in social media discussions through “playful” content such as quip-based tweets, funny memes, and sharable art (coding both FB and Twitter data). We ask, whose points of view are being expressed, and why and how do people deploy social-media based humor to attempt to influence the politics of control over women’s bodies and sexuality? This research holds relevance in the study of political communication, violence against women, and feminist/queer studies.
About the presentersRachel R. Reynolds
Rachel teaches in the Graduate Program in Communication, Culture & Media at Drexel University. (http://drexel.edu/coas/academics/gra...)
She does cultural studies work on African (Nigeria/Cameroon) national media and arts, as well as the representation of Africa and Africans in media worldwide. She also looks at immigrant media in the United States and especially immigrant youth and their influences within American culture. Her most recent project, however, investigates how popular and news media portrays Violence Against Women.
Sreyashi Mukherjee, PhD
Sreyashi is an interdisciplinary Media Studies scholar and Teaching Assistant Professor. She researches how culture and consumerism symbolically control, reflect, and reinforce identities through strategic recalibrations of media. She is also a trained generalist and teaches Communication and Media Studies courses at the Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh.