Unaffordable Rights: Neoliberalism, Reproductive Justice, and Technology and Media Activism in Texas

Abstract

This dissertation explores how communication technology use, discourses, policies, and labor practices of participants at an abortion fund in the reproductive justice (RJ) movement in Texas mutually shape one another. In addition, this project examines the ways in which these mutually constitutive elements are in conversation with the pervasive neoliberal context of Texas and the United States. This project is situated in feminist studies of healthcare, technology, and activism. The abortion fund in the study is an organization in the RJ movement, which is an intersectional and feminist movement. The fund runs a wealth redistribution hotline and generates communication outreach. This project utilizes feminist and digital ethnographic methods. The data for the project includes in-depth interviews with organizers and volunteers at the fund and participation-observation spanning across one year. In this work, I make three major arguments. I first argue it is difficult at the fund to follow competing feminist ethics of care, or caring for vulnerable individuals and about systemic justice, equally on the wealth redistribution hotline. While the fund cares about systemic injustice, the volunteers on the fund’s hotline use individual judgments when trying to best care for individuals. I next argue the digital and intimate labor of the fund’s hotline volunteers is best understood as immaterial intimacy rooted in a feminist consciousness. Immaterial intimacy is a term created in this project. Immaterial intimacy on the hotline is immaterial labor that is largely invisible to society but ubiquitous in volunteers’ lives. Immaterial intimacy includes intimate but fleeting exchanges conducted between strangers. These intimate, fleeting exchanges also require the volunteers to embody feminist sympathy, which is a feeling rooted in an intersectional feminist consciousness, or an awareness of systemic gender and other inequity. The immaterial intimacy of hotline labor is enabled by and reifies the abortion fund as a political feminist collective. Finally, I argue organizers at the fund who create communication outreach content continue immaterial and affective labor on behalf of the fund beyond their work on the hotline. I explore the labor necessary to create content that appeals to the fund’s donors and supporters and also responds strategically to detractors.