You still want to have kids, right? Representation of childfree women in Indonesian leading online news outlets

Abstract

This research aims to explore the childfree discourse constructed by the two leading online news outlets in Indonesia, namely Detik.com and Kompas.com. I argue that online news outlets construct a discourse that aims to discriminate childfree women and the representation of women in the issue of childfree is a media instrument to reproduce the ideology of pronatalism. By using the corpus assisted critical discourse studies method to analyze 137 news articles, this research found that online news outlets produce childfree discourse as a deviation, a source of problems, and a feminist agenda. In these discourses, childfree women are represented as selfish, cold, and incomplete individuals. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that online news outlets in Indonesia do not report the issue of childfree in a neutral and balanced manner. Furthermore, this research discussion seeks to uncover the role of ibuism, as a pronatalist ideology in the Indonesian context, behind the construction of these gendered discourses.

Keywords:

• Childfree women
• discourse
• representation
• online news
• ibuism

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Universitas Indonesia and Universitas Multimedia Nusantara for their endless support during this research journey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Octoparse is a software for web crawling and data scraping which helps users to extract data from websites without coding and export it to various formats.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicky Stephani

Nicky Stephani is a PhD student in Communication Science at Universitas Indonesia, researcher, and lecturer in Communication Science Online Learning Program, Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, Tangerang, Indonesia. Her research interests are gender and sexuality discourse in the contemporary media.