Miracle babies, unfit mothers and the fertility bogeyman: discourses of risk, chance and hope in infertility texts
Karen Donnelly
LAEL, Lancaster University
Infertility occupies a problematic position as both a social and medical issue (Greil et al. 2010) and despite the prevalence of media, medical and personal texts which proliferate around it there is currently little linguistic research into this topic, particularly in the UK.
The data for this paper comprises three specially built corpora of texts on infertility including; UK newspaper articles from 2006 - 2012 containing the term infertility, websites for fertility clinics from 2012 and UK blogs written by people experiencing infertility from 2006 - 2012, providing a range of perspectives on this topic and allowing triangulation of the discourses identified.
Following Baker (2006), a corpus-assisted, discourse analytical framework is applied to this data examining keywords (significantly frequent terms), collocations (words which frequently co-occur) and concordance lines (words in context) with a particular focus on identifying linguistic traces of discourses (Sunderland, 2004) around possible outcomes, specifically risk, chance and hope.
Initial analysis was carried out using Wordsmith Tools to elicit the top 100 lexical keywords from each corpus, which were then grouped thematically in order to allow comparison across the 3 corpora and guide selection for further study using collocations and concordance lines. The keywords risk(s), chance(s) and hope were found in 2 or more of the corpora and were selected for further investigation.
Concordance lines were used to study these keywords in context and several linguistic traces were identified pointing to a range of 'named' discourses around infertility and risk/hope/chance, this closer analysis also uncovered the differing linguistic manifestations of particular discourses across the text types. The extent to which these named discourses also draw on broader, overarching discourses of social rights/responsibility will also be discussed.
References
Baker, P. (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum