‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip

IF 2.9 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Mobilities Pub Date : 2023-04-01 DOI:10.1080/17450101.2022.2092887

Olivia Engle , Cordelia Freeman

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Girls on the Verge and Unpregnant) and two films (Grandma and Never Rarely Sometimes Always) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual.

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“花这么多钱，做五分钟的手术”：障碍、流动性和美国堕胎之旅的代表性

摘要堕胎之旅是过去十年中出现的一种叙事手段，故事的中心情节是寻找堕胎的旅程。在这篇论文中，我们分析了两部年轻人的小说（《边缘上的女孩》和《未怀孕的女孩》）和两部电影（《奶奶》和《从不罕见有时总是》），讲述了当代美国少女堕胎的故事。通过对这四种叙事的分析，我们认为堕胎之旅的表现是新颖的，因为它们关注的是美国堕胎的障碍和政治。虽然这些表述确实将某些障碍置于其他障碍之上，但它们标志着流行文化中堕胎话语的重要转变。决定堕胎不再是情节的“戏剧性”，而是越来越多的其他社会政治法律问题，如缺乏堕胎诊所、旅行所需的距离、青少年的法律权利、手术费用以及家人和朋友的意见。对这些结构性政治障碍的关注有助于教育观众了解美国堕胎的现实，并将堕胎话语超越个人。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Mobilities Multiple-

CiteScore

5.40

自引率

17.90%

发文量

期刊介绍： Mobilities examines both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private spaces, and the travel of material things in everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility, present new challenges for the coordination and governance of mobilities and for the protection of mobility rights and access. This has elicited many new research methods and theories relevant for understanding the connections between diverse mobilities and immobilities.