Following gynecological violence through media productions. The discursive trajectories of gynecological and obstetric violence through alternative and traditional media.

Mignon, Solène [USL-B] Denis, Lydie [USL-B] Tant, Cédric [USL-B]

This research aims to bring light on the discursive trajectories of alternative media productions on gynecological violence, a subject receiving intermittent traditional media coverage. More precisely, we wish to understand the way in which these productions emerge and, through interdiscursivity, are taken up by traditional media, hypothetically changing their meaning and thus trajectory. In doing so, this communication aims to understand how a topic that, firstly, concern a particular social group emerges and is taken up into the public media sphere. If gynecological and obstetric violence can be described as a taboo theme, the subject still occasionally found its way in French traditional media during the last years. Following the hypothesis that various cultural products (e.g. “Paye ton utérus” hashtag in 2014, the short Konbini video “Violences gynécologiques : des témoignages glaçants” in 2018, the Arte documentary “Tu enfanteras dans la douleur” in 2020) triggered the emergence of discourses around a societal topic, we use interdiscursivity and its markers, as described by Doury and Nacucchio (2019) to follow the trajectories of controversies (Chateauraynaud & Doury, 2010) and discover alterations in media coverage as part of the evolution of discourse before it’s disappearing and replacement, in an experimental diachronic approach. In that perspective, we perceive public discourses as traces and knots in time, creating webs of meanings (inspired by Ingold, 2011; Haraway, 2016). This allows us to both analyse discourses’ pathways, as well as having a reflexive viewpoint on diachronic representations. At the media level, the research is based on an essential issue for traditional journalists: the challenge of maintaining a legitimate link with their audience while the development of alternative media regularly redefines the boundaries of journalism (see, for example, Dupont & Bousquet, 2020). To maintain this link and therefore this legitimacy (Esquenazi, 1999), traditional journalists therefore seem to have to grasp – or deal differently with – subjects that better integrate certain social groups. The research therefore starts from this issue to understand how the traditional media seize productions from certain alternative media. Our corpus relies on interdiscursivity: starting from the switch of alternative media productions to legacy media, it will be generated by following our methodology. Indeed, trajectories will unveil our work material inside traditional media. We use perspectives from media studies, discourse analysis, sociology, and anthropology to experiment and develop a model that create another narrative about the way we do research.