“My dear unwanted”: media discourse on sex-selective abortion in Montenegro

ABSTRACT

Beliefs based on patriarchy have different manifestations, from gender-insensitive language to discriminatory and prejudiced behavior. While the consequences of patriarchal beliefs are observable and well-studied, more attention is required to unravel the role of societal actors that contribute to both their development and their suppression. The present research applies the novel Socio-cognitive Discourse Studies to investigate how the media acts as a significant mediating public structure that has the potential to enable or disable the reproduction of patriarchy. I investigate the media discourse on sex-selective abortion (SSA)—the practice of the targeted elimination of female fetuses. The study takes the case of Montenegro, listed among the leading countries in the world with a significantly distorted sex ratio at birth. Besides confirming that the majority of the media encourage the status quo through its passive approach to SSA, the socio-cognitive analysis also established the relationship between the media and consumers, revealing how the different discourse strategies the journalists use trigger different cognitive responses among their audience. This study discovered discursive patterns in the public presentation of women while pointing out the crucial role the media plays in disseminating analytical and balanced information on significant and worrisome tendencies, such as SSA.

KEYWORDS:

• Media discourse
• patriarchal beliefs
• sex-selective abortion
• Socio-cognitive Discourse Studies
• Montenegro

Acknowledgments

I am very thankful to Professor Dubravka Valić-Nedeljković and Professor Pilar Medina-Bravo for their insightful guidance, which significantly affected the quality of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose thorough review helped greatly in the shaping of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data available on request from the author

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Expressed through opinions, attitudes, and emotional words.

2. Such as Systematic Discourse Analysis.

3. I was prevented from including every discourse strategy in the analysis due to spatial limits. Appendix A contains the remaining discourse strategies with brief examples that clarify their classification.

4. I did not observe a significant difference between the TV and print material. Every third information shown on the TV was factual. The main Montenegrin news shows dedicated insufficient attention to SSA—only 7.32% of the analyzed news had SSA as the main topic.

5. See Appendix B.

6. In 9.13% of the comments I failed to identify expressions of emotion words and metaphors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of Montenegro [3221/2].

Notes on contributors

Jovana Davidović

Jovana Davidović is a teaching assistant and a doctoral student at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Montenegro. She was also the research associate at the Department of Communication, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, and at the Center for Media, Data, and Society, Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Jovana obtained an MA degree at the CEU’s Department of Political Science. Her research interests include media psychology and gender, political psychology, political communication.