TITLE:
The Language of Togetherness: Woman, Intimacy, and the Early COVID-19 Western Narrative
AUTHORS:
Anja Housden Brooks
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19 Narratives, Transgression, Sex Industry, News Construction, Intimacy, Woman, Language of Togetherness, Late Capitalism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Intimacy
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.3,
March
11,
2024
ABSTRACT: The news constructed language in the beginning of
the COVID-19 narrative was characterized by the strategic construction of
meaning and the use of specific narratives used to shape societal perceptions
and influence responses to the virus. The discourse on COVID-19 employed
specific narratives that were designed to strengthen
the bonds between men and women through increased intimacy amidst the onset of
the virus, which was fundamental to the UK’s response. Sky News narratives were
disseminated across many countries and played a crucial role in shaping
societal perceptions and influencing responses to the pandemic on a wider scale
to manage conflict through the construction of meaning, using discursive
devices to shape the narrative and influence the masse. The simple life, family
values and a back to nature approach were just some of the sub discourses that
make up the master discourse of intimacy. Intimacy had become somewhat of a
taboo post-millennium what with the onslaught of sadistic internet forms
of male on female pornography—and the general
mainstreaming of the sex industry—and was hidden from dominant ways of seeing
prevalent in the Western post-millennial context. In this essay, critical
discourse analysis (CDA) is used to understand the discourse of news
construction as a social practice in which language plays a central role,
emphasized by a post-structuralist paradigm. The arrival of Covid came with an
unexpected change in the cultural dynamics between men and women, transgressing
the language of lost rapport left by the sex industry and its gendered
hierarchies between the sexes in late capitalism.