Hegemonic, counterhegemonic, or pro-women's rights?: Meta-journalistic discourse on "Women's Strike" in Poland

Feminist scholarship has long viewed mainstream media as part of the ‘hegemonic domain’, implicated in justifying and reproducing oppression in society. This view is reflected in countless empirical studies on media representations of minoritised groups. What remains largely uninterrogated, however, are meta-journalistic discourses in which journalists themselves reflect on the media’s representational practices. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by studying how meta-journalistic discourse on media representations of the 2020-2021 ‘Women’s Strike’ in Poland perpetuated and challenged hegemonic power relations. It also teases out the democratic implications of this discourse. In October 2020, hundreds of thousands of Poles participated in the ‘Women’s Strike’ against the Constitutional Court’s ruling that led to the virtual ban on abortion. By prohibiting abortion for embryopathological reasons, this ruling challenged the nearly thirty-year-long hegemony of the conservative ‘abortion consensus’ that permitted pregnancy termination in only three cases. The demonstrations brought together women’s rights and queer activists, feminists, opposition politicians as well as ordinary citizens. The diversity of participants entailed a wide spectrum of postulates that ranged, in terms of women’s rights, from the return to the hegemonic, conservative status quo to the counter-hegemonic pro-choice calls for full abortion rights, and in political terms from the ousting of the government led by the ultraconservative Law and Justice (PiS) party to the counter-hegemonic demand to altogether purge the political elite of conservative men. For journalism this heterogeneity meant that certain factions and framings of the protests were foregrounded at the expense of others. This paper draws on literature on epistemic democracy and feminist-philosophical scholarship on epistemic injustice and exclusion to examine how journalists reflect on the choices made in covering the demonstrations and how, if at all, they understand the implications of these decisions. Empirically, the paper studies the articles published in (1) pro-PiS government media outlets, (2) oppositional outlets that explicitly align with the Civic Coalition party, and (3) media that do not ally with any particular political party. Generally, the pro-government media cherry-pick the postulates of the movement to demonise it as causing social unrest and attacking democracy; oppositional media highlight the calls to oust PiS so as to support their own political agenda; and the non-aligned media tend not to instrumentalise the protests for their own political ends but rather focus on the struggle for women’s rights. In this way, both pro-government and oppositional media act as agents of the hegemonic domain, while the non-aligned outlets at least try to step outside it to support the minoritised group.