Orientations Towards Gender and National Identity in the Linguistic Landscape of the Eighth Amendment Referendum Campaign
Based on a linguistic landscape approach, which deals with language use in public space, my PhD research focused on the recent (and ongoing) debates surrounding the legalisation of abortion in Ireland, and how issues of gender and national identity surface in signage commenting on or advocating for or against liberalisation of abortion laws.
On 25th May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland voted in a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which severely restricted access to abortion services in the state. The issue of abortion is a site where questions of Irish national identity and women’s stake in society collide. As Irish politics plays out on posters, billboards, stickers and graffiti, the LL affords key insights into discourses of gender and national identity circulating during the lead-up to the vote. My project takes the form of a linguistic landscape (LL) analysis of the referendum campaign, specifically addressing the intersection of gender and national identity.
While Ireland has been a notable site of LL research, the focus has been on language ideologies and the representation of Irish in the LL. Although I addressed these issues too, this project analysed issues of ideology, politics and gender in the Irish LL, adopting a geosemiotic approach (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) to ask how linguistic and semiotic resources were used to discursively construct the relationship between women and the Irish state.
I looked at the referendum from a number of perspectives, each based on a different set of linguistic landscape data (images of signs of various kinds). I drew on images of signage collected first-hand and by informants during the weeks preceding the vote (May 2018), as well as images sourced from social media of signage at protest demonstrations in March 2018. I also analysed a dataset of postcards, ‘Notes to Savita’, which appeared on a wall in Dublin the day before the referendum vote was to take place, commenting on the referendum and functioning as an ‘in memoriam’ to Savita Halappanavar (who tragically died in 2012 after being denied an abortion in Galway University Hospital, subsequently becoming a powerful figure in the campaign for abortion rights). I also carried out interviews with activists to uncover meaningful categories of analysis for those involved in campaigning on the ground.
The main research question motivating my research was how different social actors (campaign groups, political organisations, individuals, graffiti-artists, etc.) used ‘Irishness’ (in its many forms - be it the state, reference to national identity, nationalist politics, etc.) to campaign in the referendum, with reference to discourses of gender. Was it important to vote (either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’) because of or in spite of national identity (i.e. ‘Irishness’) or relationship to Ireland, and what does this mean for the relationship between women and national identity? In summary, I looked at how different groups and actors used different linguistic and non-linguistic resources to discursively construct the relationship between ‘women’ and the Irish state, national identity and Irish society during the referendum campaign.
Articles stemming from my PhD research have been published in a number of journals. In Language and Society, I published an analysis of the use of the Irish language during the 2018 referendum campaign, employing a mixed-methods approach and drawing on the interviews which I carried out with activists involved in the campaign to support my sociolinguistic analysis. In other work, published in Linguistic Landscape, I have explored the application of Gramscian hegemony to explain the distribution of semiotic resources in the 2018 referendum campaign’s linguistic landscape. Most recently, my analysis of the discursive construction of gender and agency n the referendum campaign's linguistic landscape was published in Critical Discourse Studies.