- Title
- Practices of media production and positioning of women in South African newspaper articles about abortion, 1978 to 2005
- Creator
- Feltham-King, Tracey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8695-9367
- Subject
- Abortion -- Press coverage
- Subject
- Abortion -- Law and legislation -- South Africa
- Subject
- Abortion -- Moral and ethical aspects
- Date
- 2010-01
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/28728
- Identifier
- vital:74638
- Description
- The context in which legal abortion occurred changed radically in South Africa from 1978 to 2005. The Abortion and Sterilization Act Act No.2 of 1975 severely compromised most South African women's reprouctive rights. Legal abortions were only accessible in practice to white middle-class women. After the process of democratization was initiated the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act Act No.92 of 1996 came into effect. This Act was hailed as a complete transformation of the previous legislation and sought to make abortion legal and accessible to all South African women within the first trimester of their pregnancies. This study sought to examine the influence of this transformation on the practices of media production and the representation of women in newspaper articles written about abortion. A post-structuralist feminist approach to a content analysis was adopted using articles about abortion which were published in 25 South African newspapers over a 28-year period. The practices of media production were quantified by looking at the events which were reported on in the newspapers in relation to abortion as well as the commentators who were called on to comment in those articles. The practices of representation were identified according to the words used to indicate the subject woman, in those articles and the discourses used to position women in relation to abortion. The media practices of production were shown to be historically contingent. There was a shift from reports of events occurring in the formalised knowledge domain, before the transition to democracy, to events generated by the politics of individual opinion, after 1990. Although state and political commentators were the most prevalent as commentators overall, after 1990 individual media experts comprised the greatest proportion of individual commentators. This coincided with the generation of more dialogue, discussion, opinion and commentary about the topic of abortion. Women emerged more prominently as commentators around the time of legislative change and initial implementation of the new legislation. Overall a strong relationship emerged between the gender of the commentators and their alignment to the abortion issue. Male commentators were most often aligned to the pro-life side of the debate and female commentators most often to the pro-choice lobby. The strategic utilisation of particular indicators and subject positions for women in newspaper articles about abortion was evident. There was an increase of the use of the term girl at the time when the new legislation was being formulated and challenged. Women were only made visible as autonomous subjects after 1990, when the transition to democracy had begun. Despite this visibility and the radical transformation of the abortion legislation, however, women are still most often positioned as victims in newspaper articles written about abortion.
- Description
- Thesis (M.Soc. Sc) -- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2010
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (ix, 198 leaves)
- Format
- Publisher
- University of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Fort Hare
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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Collections
UFH Department of Psychology
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Masters Thesis Full Draft.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |