Twitter and abortion

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the misogynistic abuse against female Chilean politicians who openly supported a pro-choice bill that allowed the access to abortion in limited circumstances. We analysed the verbal abuse targeted at these politicians during the legislation of the abortion bill (2015–2017) and the linguistic and discursive patterns of online abuse. To that end, we collected tweets from this legislation period and created a subset with specific milestones of the parliamentary debate. Further, we undertook a corpus-assisted analysis of the data, focusing on collocations and keywords, which were then analysed in the light of van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework on the representation of social actors and legitimation strategies. Results evidence that violence against women in power can take forms other than the explicit sexual, physical, and psychological threats that are commonly identified. Violence targets these women as it is claimed that they are unsuitable to legislate for allegedly having tolerated and protected crime. Therefore, the corrective function of abuse takes the form of legal actions against their crimes.