Exploring gender and sexuality through a Twitter lens: the digital framing effect of the #fertilityday campaign by female users

摘要

Digital media have significantly contributed to the articulating and shaping of the contemporary debate about gender and sexuality, often disrupting numerous stereotypes promoted insistently by the media. This contribution aims to deepen the relationships among gender, sexuality, and media, through the analysis of a specific case study based on the Fertility Day campaign, an initiative launched by the Italian Ministry of Health to draw attention to the country's fertility and counteract the falling birth rates. The campaign intended to encourage couples to have more sex and conceive more babies, focusing on 'the beauty of maternity and paternity'. But the campaign was denounced as being offensive, sexist, and ageist, triggering numerous online reactions. In this paper we present the findings of a content analysis of 5,300 public tweets characterized by the hashtag #fertilityday. These data show how hundreds of citizens used the campaign's hashtag to construct a counter-narrative around the right and the choice to have a baby (Vicari et al., 2018. Political hashtag publics and counter-visibility: A case study of #fertilityday in Italy.Information, Communication & Society, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1555271). We focused our attention on how female users narratively reframed the institutional discourse, shifting the topic from the problem of 'fertility', in a strict sense, to the importance of welfare policies capable of supporting maternity and facilitating gender equality. We consider this case study as emblematic for its power of being an indicator of progress in public discourse on the sociocultural construction of the role of women.