Intersectional Representation in Online Media Discourse: Reflecting Anti-Discrimination Position in Reporting on Same-Sex Partnerships

The famous car crash metaphor used by American lawyer and philosopher Kimberlé Crenshaw to illustrate the intersectional inequality of black women in American society has become the symbol of intersectionality theory, which does not define discrimination and social exclusion uniaxially—in the case of black women only from a sexual or only from a racial perspective—but as an interaction of different circumstances. The theory of intersectionality has been widely used in various research while we notice a persistent gap in reflecting its application to media analysis. In our study, we focus on the concept of “representational intersectionality”, which Crenshaw uses to illustrate the dynamics between different discourses. Taking the example of online media reporting on same-sex partnerships in Slovenia, we analyse how power relations are reinforced when one type of media discourse fails to acknowledge the importance of other discourses. Further, focusing on the representational aspect in intersectionality theory, we define intersectionality not only as the result of the interaction of different personal circumstances (e.g., sexual orientation and race) but recognise that it is also shaped by a broader social context. Together with Floya Anthias, we argue that power and privilege are reproduced through “hierarchies of social locations”, and we demonstrate how such reproduction functions in an online media environment. The main contribution of our study is thus to show how the theory of intersectionality, focusing on representation and social location, can be useful within a critical discursive analysis, specifically to reflect the anti-discrimination position in media reporting. Using the example of the online content of four traditional mass media in the case of the Slovenian law legalising same-sex marriage enacted by the Slovenian Parliament in March 2015 and rejected in a public referendum later that year, our media discourse analysis based on Norman Fairclough demonstrates that the marginalisation and lack of reflection of the intersectional perspective in the online media reporting on same-sex partnerships weakened the anti-discrimination position advocating marriage equality while it reinforced the discourse on the so-called children’s rights directed against equality advocates. Children’s rights discourse has foregrounded the struggle to protect the alleged children’s rights, which they claimed to be deprived of if the law was to be enacted. Opponents of marriage equality reduced the complex intersection of same-sex inequality, manifested in legal, economic, social, and other contexts, to the discourse of children’s rights related to the adoption of children and their alleged “homosexual” treatment in educational institutions. Our analysis reveals that the absence of an intersectional perspective contributes to the weakening of anti-discrimination discourses. We argue that the intersectionality framework is relevant for analysing online media coverage of marginalised social groups (including those discriminated against gender and sexual orientation), as it can show how discrimination is portrayed and eventually reproduced in online media reporting.