U.S. Gay Marriage Vote: discursive-frame-what? by neil
A comment accompanied by one raised eyebrow and short head-tilt to the side:
On the headline “Gay Marriage Ban Falls Short of Majority” , does this not amount to “Gay Marriage Ban Defeated” or “Senate Votes Against Gay Marriage Ban” or “Gay Marriage Ban Fails in Senate” or “Senators Against Gay Marriage in Minority as Marriage Upheld by Majority in Vote” or “Gay Marriage Upheld in Senate Vote” or “U.S. Senate Affirms Gay Marriage”? Talk about couching events in a negative orientation…
The headline amounts to selective and circumscribed work by primary (mass/mainstream media) definers to contain and contextualize the event. Of course, this is ongoing, the very function and purpose of event coverage and news-media production. Note the activation of implied consensus around the inevitability of the ban and its “falling short of majority” as a temporary bump in the road, as if prohibition is the normal and naturalized condition, as if there were a few mischievious and malevolent dissenters who disturbed the outcome, rather than a legislative process functioning within its parameters to register votes by representatives. While I’m hesitant to sing the praises of the U.S. Senate as a ‘fair’ and ‘equitable’ representative body, many have said this would not make it through the Senate, and it hasn’t…It is significant, though, in that via the version implied by the headline, the vote becomes a ‘rupture’ acting on a specific and normative political program that is organized and aligned through media outlets doing the work of tidy recuperation on an outcome that remains embedded in delinquency and pathology.
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