The Reappropriation of Anne of Green Gables in Support of Abortion Rights

Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

These opponents criticised Anne’s positioning as a feminist icon, and considerable discursive struggles between the two sides emerged. Anne is often depicted as a young girl with unmistakeable agency, unusual in the literature of her time; her distinctive visual characteristics (her braided red hair, for instance) are also important here and lend themselves to memification. She is an attractive icon for the pro-choice movement because her image connects well with the affordances of digital communication technologies.

The movement was then also further reified as the hashtags and associated imagery for this movement crossed over from the digital to the physical world, in posters, stickers, demonstration placards, and red braids placed on statues. The hashtag #heyWADE was especially prominent here, and the associated movement was established through the everyday recurrence of the polyphonic discursive practices associated with it. Additional hashtags – such as #iamcarrots, playing on Anne’s nickname ‘Carrots’, for her hair colour – also emerged here.

Such tactics are not new, and not specific to this case study; #iam...-style hashtags are increasingly common (#jesuischarlie is an earlier example, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris), but this is a particularly salient example.