When is she a woman?: Gendered subject forming language in TRAP laws

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the ways in which states can exercise dispersed disciplinary power as exemplified in a selective erasure of gender from Indiana’s Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws. To do this, this article investigates a critical discourse analysis using Indiana’s TRAP laws that have been brought to the floor of the state legislature from 2013–2018. The major narrative present throughout these texts is an intentional re-framing of gendered subjectivity or who gets to be called “woman”. Such state-driven discourse has the power to regulate social norms. Such norms and language assumptions often find their way into policy, including those defining how women can act or not act in regard to the termination of a pregnancy. Thus, by examining how TRAP laws deploy certain discourse, one better understands how the state, via legislation, takes an active role in controlling the public sphere by becoming an institutionalized pattern of interpretation.