My body my choice: The hostile appropriation of feminist cultural memory in American anti-vaccine movements

Abstract

This article discusses how the reproductive rights slogan ‘my body my choice’ – which functions as a carrier of feminist cultural memory – was weaponised when it gained traction in anti-vaccine movements that appropriated it. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, transnationally coordinated groups associated with the far right and characterised by nationalist and pro-life values started using the protest slogan to politicise their resistance to local lockdown restrictions and vaccine and mask mandates. The article shows that their use of the slogan was a hostile form of mnemonic appropriation and analyses the discursive mechanisms used to discredit the reproductive rights movement. It demonstrates that when slogans become carriers of cultural memory, they can be used in claim-making by movements on opposing sides of the political spectrum. It concludes that protest memories can be used politically both in the advancement of social movement causes as well as in the backlash against those causes.

In 2020, during the global Covid-19 pandemic, the reproductive rights slogan ‘my body my choice’ migrated from feminist movements to anti-vaccine, anti-facemask, and anti-lockdown protesters. When ‘my body my choice’ is used to protest against Covid-19 restrictions and vaccinations rather than to fight for abortion rights, what happens to the cultural memory accrued by this famous slogan in its five decades of usage? How does this memory get instrumentalised, implicitly or explicitly as the slogan travels across different causes and political divides?

Protest slogans are made to be memorable and accrue cultural memories in their long histories of use. This means they can shed light on the important role of language and multimodal discursive strategies in the memory-activism nexus understood as the question how ‘remembering the past, shaping the future remembrance of the present, and struggles for a better future feed into each other’ (Rigney, 2018: 372; see also Rigney, 2020). There has been a wealth of studies on explicit, conscious, and commemorative forms of memory, for instance in the growing number of recent studies that look at the entanglement of social movements and memories (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023; Zamponi, 2018), which are often focused on questions of how references to a shared past can help build collective identities (Hajek, 2013). This article focuses on how the implicit cultural memory of a longer history of feminist struggle is mobilised in the hostile appropriation of ‘my body my choice’ by political detractors. In doing so, it takes up Astrid Erll’s suggestion that what is needed is a ‘better understanding of the hidden power of everyday, automatic forms’ of implicit memory (Erll, 2022: 13).

Moreover, this article aims to contribute to an understanding of mnemonic appropriation, understood as the ‘activist appropriation of historical symbols’ such as protest slogans with long histories of use (Kubal and Becerra, 2014: 866). As Ned Richardson-Little and Samuel Merrill have shown in their article on the appropriation of the 1989 democratic slogan ‘Wir sind das Volk’ by the right-wing anti-immigration movement Pegida, social movements can draw on and appropriate a past that is not theirs using a recognisable symbol of progressive politics in order to boost their reputation, credibility, and even legibility (Richardson-Little and Merrill, 2020). Building on this insight, I explore what happens when one movement takes up a protest slogan to issue a direct attack on the movement that originally used it, with reference to the use of the reproductive rights slogan ‘my body my choice’ on the part of anti-vaccine activists. I show how slogans work as carriers of cultural memory and how those memories are appropriated by social movements across the political spectrum. Appropriation is not always hostile towards the original movement a slogan came from. Accordingly, I distinguish between ‘affiliative’ appropriation – which refers to the slogan’s uptake for causes affiliated with its original usage – and ‘hostile’ forms of mnemonic appropriation – which involves the weaponisation of political symbols, such as slogans associated with feminist claim-making and reproductive rights, by political detractors.

Behind this analysis is an understanding of ‘my body my choice’ as a protest slogan that has become a portable monument to feminism. Portable monuments are not only literally more transportable than their bronze or marble counterparts, they can also figuratively be transported to new contexts. While the concept was formulated in reference to how literary texts are ‘recycled among various groups’ across time and space (Rigney, 2004: 38), a recent study has analysed the protest song ‘Bella Ciao’ as a portable monument to Italian anti-fascist resistance, showing that it became ‘part of the repertoire of protest of many movements across the globe’ (Salerno and van de Warenburg, 2023: 164). In a similar way, ‘my body my choice’ is also semantically transformed and translated, leading to a proliferation of adaptations and variations, and it is mobilised for an ever-widening range of affiliated feminist political claims as well as for claims that are ‘at the opposite’ end of the political spectrum (Salerno and van de Warenburg, 2023: 178). I first discuss the characteristics that allowed the slogan to become a portable monument for feminism itself, focussing on how this led to the slogan’s continued use in affiliated social movements where it mobilises the implicit memory of a longer history of feminist struggle. I then analyse the mnemonic appropriation of the slogan during the Covid-19 pandemic as a hostile form of political claim-making through a close-reading of articles in Anglophone media outlets where demonstrators are quoted on their reasons for using the slogan.

Cultural memory as rallying cry: slogans as portable monuments and collective action frames

Protest slogans are concise and catchy phrases that mobilise people, politicise issues and inspire loyalty to a cause (Shankle, 1941). They can be aimed at others, for example, bystanders, politicians and the media, but they can also be self-directed and meant for an internal audience as morale-boosting rallying cries, indicating that they carry a powerful affective charge for those who use them (Van de Velde, 2022). As hybrid visual, textual, tactile and acoustic signs, they are multimodal and can be chanted or written onto bodies and bellies; they can even be ‘written with blood’, making slogans ‘a representative genre of social semiotics where meanings are projected via a range of modes’ (Al-Sowaidi et al., 2017: 638). The fields of linguistics, rhetoric, communication, and propaganda studies have shed light on the persuasiveness of specific linguistic, rhetorical, and poetic techniques employed in claim-making (see also Alimi, 2015), incidentally theorising what makes slogans so memorable, allowing those that stick to become potential carriers of cultural memory. They ‘stick’ due to their ‘special sound patterns’ which often draw on linguistic techniques such as ‘parallelism, antimetabole, colloquialism, alliteration, assonance and antithesis’ (Al-Sowaidi et al., 2017: 629). ¹

A study of the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella movement collected over 1000 slogans to inventorise the movement’s wide diversity of claims (Veg, 2016). Jenny Pickerill and John Krinsky’s (2012) study of the Occupy movement argues that the inclusivity of the slogan ‘we are the 99 percent’ contributed to its resonance and staying power, noting that ‘in the last century, only a few [slogans] have stood the test of time’, which makes these slogans especially worthy of more attention (p. 281). They argue, moreover, that slogans partially serve the function of collective action frames, a concept used to understand ‘the generation, diffusion, and functionality of mobilising and countermobilizing ideas and meaning’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 612). In framing theory actors are not ‘carriers of extant ideas and meaning’, but rather signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists and bystanders or observers’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 613). While this places agency with social movement actors, it is argued here that slogans have agency too since their adoption by social movement actors relies on their aesthetic and reproductive affordances.

Protest slogans are key elements in the activist repertoire of contention (see also Alimi, 2015; Tilly, 2010). The repertoire of contention – defined most broadly as ‘claims-making routines’ (Tilly and Tarrow, 2006: 16) – is not limited to tactics like petitions, demonstrations and boycotts but also includes discursive practices. For instance, the use of recognisable protest slogans from the past that remind demonstrators of the historical significance, legitimacy and continuity of their struggle. Due to their repeated use across time by movements affiliated with the same political cause, elements from the repertoire of contention – such as protest slogans – become invested with ‘a type of ownership’, meaning certain memories are thought to belong to specific groups only (Kubal and Becerra, 2014: 869). ² As I will argue in this paper, this sense of ownership – which lends the slogan its resonance – is corroded when it is appropriated in a hostile way. Conceptualising protest slogans as a part of the repertoire of contention also helps highlight the fact that slogans are not static linguistic utterances. The use and specific media-material (re)production of protest slogans constitutes a cultural practice that is embodied by and embedded in political groups. Considered as a form of action, it matters whether a slogan like ‘my body my choice’ is painted onto a belly or an arm.

As slogan scholar Elliot Colla points out, some ‘slogans have histories’ (Colla, 2013: 38). In composing slogans, the activists he interviewed almost always drew ‘on a known corpus of older protest slogans some going back decades’ (Colla, 2013: 38). Similarly, Zoé Carle argues that slogans with longer histories can acquire their own ‘cultural biography’ (Carle, 2019: 249), applying the concept from Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things (2013 [1988]) in order to signal an attentiveness to the factors at play in the trajectories, modes of dissemination and adaptation and, ultimately, the long-term afterlives of slogans. Metaphor and humour theorists have addressed the role of implicit references to the past by highlighting how creative and humoristic slogans are both rooted in ‘the sociocultural contexts they are created in’, while using multimodal metaphorical creativity to render shared cultural knowledge salient through ‘intended violations of codes of representation’ (Romano, 2013: 251). By building or punning on longer cultural semiotic traditions, ‘slogans draw attention to the past to champion alternative futures’ (Knight, 2015: 242). A slogan’s history of use matters since each time people use it again, the memory of its earlier uses is mobilised.

As references to the past or phrases from the past, protest slogans can be used in disseminating, mediating, recontextualising and appropriating cultural memories. Alessandra Miklavcic’s study on slogans and post-memory in the Italo–Slovenian borderland, for instance, analyses how slogans that reference the past can mobilise memory by conveying a ‘condensed notion of history’ (Miklavcic, 2008: 444). Ned Richardson-Little and Samuel Merrill’s (2020) study of the appropriation of the 1989 slogan ‘Wir sind das Volk’ by the anti-Islam and anti-immigration movement Pegida showed how the cultural memory of the 1989 democratic protests invoked by the slogan functioned as a so-called ‘reputational shield’ to deflect attention away from Pegida’s far-right extremism (see also Ivarsflaten, 2006). This reflects a wider trend in right-wing movements that often appropriate ‘mainstream mnemonic symbols to legitimise themselves in the eyes of conservatives and others wary of radicalism’ (Richardson-Little and Merrill, 2020: 65). Building on this insight, I further unpack the discursive mechanisms and political effects at stake in the appropriation of memory-laden slogans by analysing what happens when an appropriated slogan is not used as a tool of self-legitimation but as a direct attack on the original political movement that coined it.

Cultural carriers like slogans have their own aesthetic agency (see also Rigney, 2021) by virtue of their linguistic form, which generates ‘an experience of the medium’ (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 4). Their aesthetic features contribute to their portability, which in turn can contribute to certain slogans acquiring long histories of use, the memory of which can be mobilised in new contexts. This becomes clear when considering what made this slogan become so available for reuse across different causes. The slogan owes part of its staying power to its brevity, which packs a punch in only five syllables and consists of iambs that alternate stressed and unstressed syllables. The repetition of ‘my’ creates an internal full rhyme and the vowel rhyme of the words ‘body’ and ‘choice’ adds to its appeal and viscosity using language that draws attention to itself through its aesthetic features, making it an example of what linguist Roman Jakobson has famously called the poetic function of language (Jakobson, 1960). Despite the stickiness of this slogan, adaptations and variations have multiplied and abounded over the past five decades to such an extent that a full inventory exceeds the scope of this article. Some well-known variations include ‘my body my decision’ and ‘my uterus my rules’. A slogan’s adaptability and aesthetic features contribute to its longevity and capacity to become a carrier of cultural memory as a portable monument. In other words, there is a link between poetic features such as prosody and portability. Sometimes what is reproduced in a variation slogan is the gist of the slogan’s semantic content, at other times, its prosody, rhythm or rhyming pattern. What catches on in the portability of ‘my body my choice’ is threefold: (1) the semantic articulation of the idea that bodily autonomy, conceived in terms of ownership, is a civic right; (2) the metonymic semantic logic of the slogan, and (3) catchiness itself, as the concise rhythmic punch, vowel rhyme, word repetition, alliteration, or even the five-syllabic prosody of the slogan is reused, reworked or translated.

Another key element that makes the slogan ‘my body my choice’ available for reuse and adoption, which makes it more portable, is its indexicality. Despite its semantic emphasis on individuality and ownership, the personal possessive pronoun ‘my’ becomes paradoxically impersonal since it is semantically deictic or context-dependent, meaning that ‘my’ refers to anyone who uses it. This allows it to spread across contexts and causes as it can be used for a wide range of claims. This accounts for both the slogan’s wide geographical dissemination across feminist causes as well as for its survival across decades. As Sidney Tarrow argues in The Language of Contention (2013), the main characteristic of contentious words that endure is their flexibility, which makes them ‘modular and available for repetition’ and helps ‘create coalitions’ that enable groups with different agendas to come together. They condense meaning as ‘condensation symbols which grow in complexity with increased dissociation from their original usage’ (15). Protest slogans with a high degree of indexicality have the capacity to become polysemic and affiliate kindred struggles, creating the impression of a wider movement of allies by mobilising a shared collective action frame and by gesturing towards a shared cultural memory of struggle.

The flexibility created through deictic words whose meaning is context-dependent is a key factor in establishing inclusivity and resonance, which can make a frame more available for adoption in both affiliative and hostile ways. The frame of individual bodily autonomy as a civic right is ‘sufficiently broad in interpretative scope, inclusivity, flexibility, and cultural resonance’ to function as a so-called master frame, which is broader in scope than most social movement claims and as such has ‘utility for other movements’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619). This slogan presents such a master frame since its proprietary logic is especially culturally resonant in a capitalist socio-political context where it touches on notions of private property, individuality, and ownership. Yet the success of such a frame does not only rely on its polysemy as an utterance or on the ideas at stake and their ability to resonate with widely held social views, it also matters how those ideas are expressed. The rhythmically catchy prosody of the slogan is as much responsible for its stickiness and portability as its resonance as a master frame. Both have contributed to the continued circulation of ‘my body my choice’ for over five decades.

The slogan’s history of use in feminist and affiliated movements started in the 1970s when it was coined during the Women’s Liberation Movement. Over time, it has become almost synonymous with feminism and the struggle for reproductive rights. In the American context, the slogan was initially used in the years preceding the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade, which declared it a constitutional right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, effectively legalising and decriminalising abortion. The slogan resonates with and reflects the focus on embodiment and the body as a site of politics in feminist movements (Conboy et al., 1997; Kevin, 2009). Decades later, the phrase is still scrawled onto cardboard, printed onto badges and chanted in the streets, but by now it has acquired the memory of its longer history of usage.

While protest slogans provide a more shorthand reference to the past than storied versions such as literary works or historical documentaries, the ‘remembered event’ at stake in the usage of a protest slogan with a long history is the longer history of the struggle itself. Using ‘my body my choice’, protesters do not necessarily explicitly remember a specific moment in the history of the struggle for equality and reproductive rights. Instead, they invoke a diffuse set of historical references: the myriad acts and gestures – both micro- and macro-political, and the numerous moments of protest across time both during and in between bigger mobilisations when the slogan was taken up before. Through its repeated reuse across time and space and remediation across different media, such as buttons, graffiti or stickers, the endurance of the slogan itself becomes a reminder of the endurance of the feminist movement at large. What ‘catches on’ in the use of this slogan, then, is the sense of momentum itself that has allowed the slogan to catch on. It functions as a portable monument for feminism itself since it serves as reminder that, even across its ebbs and tides, its wins and losses, the movement – like the slogan – is here to stay.

The slogan functions as a carrier of feminist cultural memory, not only in being a phrase originating in the past but also as an act of writing that continues a longer tradition. For instance, when it is written on the belly, this constitutes the use of a recognisable and integral element from the feminist repertoire of contention since women first started writing slogans on their bodies in the 1970s. By reproducing the slogan on the skin, protesters ‘continue the feminist project of taking bodies seriously as both the subject and object of thinking’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001: 3). Just because the use of the slogan by affiliated movements in the present does not always entail an explicit form of recollection, does not mean it is not a form of cultural memory work. Astrid Erll recently argued for the importance of distinguishing between explicit and implicit memory (Erll, 2022). While she did not refer to social movements (for that see Zamponi, 2018), her comment on implicit memory is also relevant when considering the memory-activism nexus. She identifies ‘schemata, stereotypes, patterns of framing and world models’ as elements of ‘implicit collective memory’, these are ‘usually not explicitly known or addressed, but get passed on from generation to generation – in order to shape perception and action in new situations’ (Erll, 2022: 1, my emphasis).

Erll’s reference to framing here draws on cognitive studies of memory but is compatible with the theory of framing on which social movement theorists have long relied in conceptualising collective action frames. That theory is also useful here in explaining how, when slogans are re-used, it is not just the semantic meaning of the words themselves that is transmitted, but also the world view contained in those words as a frame. The slogan ‘my body my choice’ thus carries the implicit cultural memory of its earliest usage in the Women’s Liberation Movement by transmitting a particular collective action frame from the past into the present. The frame that constructs individual bodily autonomy and choice as a civic right survives its origins and allows the slogan to cross to new affiliated causes.

As such, it has been used to speak out against ‘sexual violence, domestic violence and intimate partner violence’, but it is also mobilised to advocate for the de-stigmatisation of sex work (Mama Cash, 2023). It has gained traction in body positivity debates and critical reflections on gendered beauty standards (Rolfes, 2019). It features in so-called ‘slut walks’ or ‘miniskirt marches’ (Msonza, 2016), protests, and discussions about dress codes and the right to freely choose what one wears without judgement, restrictions, sexualisation or victim-blaming. In the wider LGBTQIA+ community the slogan has been employed to assert the right to self-identify and express one’s gender and sexuality in a way that feels authentic as well as to advocate for trans rights and access to gender-affirming care (Picard, 2023). Even in the context of reproductive rights it has been used to advocate for a wider range of causes such as access to a vasectomy or tubal sterilisation (Bolton and Juhlin, 2022). The slogan’s ambiguity has even been interpreted as an invitation to adopt it for new causes since it prompts ‘an enduring commitment to explain . . . what ‘my body is mine’ means in many areas of our lives’ (Mama Cash, 2023).

Suffice this broad-brush overview to indicate the slogan’s portability in crossing over to a sprawling range of new political claims in recontextualisations, translations ³ and adaptations. When the slogan is adopted by affiliated movements, it confers a historical legitimacy on the newer claim by placing it in a lineage of a longer feminist struggle. The process of affiliation also allows movements to broaden their political claims and to connect to other struggles. This is similar to what in social movements studies is called frame alignment, defined as the way individuals and social movements use ‘schemata of interpretation’ that allow the interpretative frameworks of individuals and movements to line up and become complementary (Snow et al., 1986: 464). Distinguishing between affiliative and hostile appropriation shows that frames are not only used tactically to link social movements around a shared ideology; they can also travel across the political spectrum and be used tactically as an attack on the original movement.

Methodology

The following analysis is based on a corpus of 343 sources, taken from three datasets. The first dataset, consisting of 48 articles, is the outcome of searches for the slogan’s affiliated usage in predominantly left-leaning newspapers, news sites, and websites from feminist organisations across the world. Having observed the slogan’s widespread feminist use for a broad range of causes, I then collected articles on its appropriation through a Google alert for ‘my body my choice’ AND ‘vaccine’ set on February 8, 2023, running till February 10, 2024. This yielded my second data set of 45 articles relating to the use of the slogan in anti-vaccine campaigning that appeared online in newspapers, magazines, online news outlets and blogs. It included opinion articles, letters to editors and columns from local or regional newspapers, but also articles from a metal magazine, an airline news website, a legal magazine, two religious magazines, and right-wing nationalist news outlets such as The Patriotic Post. With two exceptions – one from Canada and one from Israel – all articles are from US American sources.

The third data set was the outcome of searches using the same combination of terms in the news database Lexis Nexis, which resulted in a corpus of 1473 articles published between 1 January 2020 and 31 October 2023 in international newspapers, press releases, news transcripts and online news sources. Of these, the doubles were omitted, and the first 250 articles scanned to assess the geographic dissemination of the appropriated slogan as well as the frequency of its reporting across differently politically positioned news outlets. The conservative right-wing US American news outlet Fox News featured 39 hits for the search term, while the left-wing newspaper The New York Times featured 23. The British newspaper The Guardian featured 14 articles that reference the anti-vaccine movement’s appropriation of the slogan. The initial scanning of the material showed that the slogan has also been used in the anti-vaccine context in Australia (Chan and Beaman, 2021), Canada (Persico, 2021), and England (Shackle, 2021). However, the majority of hits, even for European newspapers were for reports on the slogan’s usage in the United States, which motivates the geographic focus of this paper. This approach comes with the obvious limitation of its focus on Anglophone media but its combination of different corpora allows the scope to extend mainstream media.

Having collected these data sets, I then proceeded to zoom in on particular examples in order to grasp how and why anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protesters used this slogan. In doing so, I close-read articles quoting protesters’ reflections on their use of the slogan to illustrate which kinds of political claims the slogan helped them formulate. Since these quotes are not collected using primary data from interviews but come from secondary accounts – since they are selected by journalists and embedded in journalistic articles – the analysis not only covers how anti-vaxxers have appropriated the slogan but also partly addresses how the media have framed that appropriation.

Appropriation: the use of ‘my body my choice’ in anti-vaccine movements

Given the importance of the ‘my body my choice’ slogan as a portable monument for feminism, what are the discursive mechanism and political effects of its hostile mnemonic appropriation by protest movements against lockdown restrictions and vaccine and mask mandates that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic? As I will argue, this instance of appropriation was hostile in that it staged an attack on the struggle for reproductive rights. Movements against Covid-19 restrictions occurred across countries and were often transnationally coordinated; their online presence on Facebook ‘involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages’ (Johnson et al., 2020: 230), and they were characterised by nationalist and populist values (Foster and Feldman, 2021; Zhou, 2022). While the slogan was used in anti-covid restriction protests in Australia, Canada and England, its usage was especially prevalent in the United States.

Given the religious conservatism which characterises the anti-vaccine movement in the United States (Perry et al., 2020), and the fact that ‘many anti-vaxxers are also anti-abortion (so-called pro-life) and endorse legal restrictions on abortion access as a way to prevent harm to fetuses’ (Rulli and Campbell, 2022: 708), their use of the slogan is perhaps more openly hostile than has been suggested in the literature so far. A study on the slogan’s online appropriation as a hashtag, for instance, claims it was primarily used by anti-vaccine users ‘to summarize their own positions on vaccines and masks rather than capitalize on the hashtag’s success’ (Menghini et al., 2022: 116). While according to their findings, ‘the hashtag was not hashjacked to make women’s reproductive rights more polarized but rather to express a different argument against Covid-19 vaccines’ (Menghini et al., 2022: 116), my analysis focuses on the instances when the slogan’s appropriation was explicitly aimed at discrediting the reproductive rights movement by hijacking a key phrase in the cultural memory of the feminist struggle for reproductive rights.

In the United States especially, ‘anti-vaccination skepticism’ is best understood as an ideological position in the culture wars as Christian nationalism is one of the strongest predictors of anti-vaccine attitudes among ‘white evangelical Protestants, political conservatives, and antiscience Americans’ who want to ‘return an exclusivist religious traditionalism into the public sphere’ (Perry et al., 2020: 1). However, it is worth noting that Covid-19 and vaccine scepticism is not limited to this single demographic. As The Guardian’s Samira Shackle writes, covid-sceptic protesters who take to the street can include ‘members of far right and football hooligan groups’ but suburban mums ‘who post memes about children being traumatised by masks’ on Facebook exist alongside conspiracy theorists and those who ‘came to the movement via alternative health and new age communities’ (Shackle, 2021). While the groups described above might also use the slogan – indicating that there might be grey zones that include those who are anti-vaccine and pro-choice – the slogan is also appropriated as a direct, and often explicit attack on pro-choice feminism when it is adopted by right-wing pro-life Christian conservative nationalists. This shows that the slogan has become weaponised in a politically polarised culture war.

In fact, this position in the culture war, combining anti-vaccination claim-making with an attack on the reproductive right movement, already predates the Covid-19 pandemic, as a 2019 study showed that individuals who posted anti-vaccination comments on Facebook ‘tended to express anti-abortion and pro-gun sentiments’ (Hoffman et al., 2019: 2220). Moreover, whether explicitly intended to do so or not, the appropriation of a protest slogan can monopolise a key asset in activists’ repertoire of contention, thereby side-lining the original movement that used the slogan. The slogan’s online appropriation as a hashtag came with a ‘monopolization factor’ in that it temporarily drowned out the online voices of those who used it in a reproductive rights context since it could ‘no longer be uniquely associated’ with claims about abortion and bodily autonomy as the Covid-19 outbreak led to a 75% increase of its usage in relation to covid and vaccines (Menghini et al., 2022: 111–112).

The discursive mechanisms behind the slogan’s hostile mnemonic appropriation rely for a large part on the successful exploitation of the slogan’s indexical referentiality (since ‘my’ is semantically deictic) and the adoption of its culturally resonant master frame of individual choice and bodily autonomy as a civic right. This frame is translated by anti-vaxxers as an objection to government regulation and as an intrusion on civil liberties (Warren, 2021). In this, it builds on a specific co-optation of the slogan which also predates the pandemic. Journalist Marie Solis noted that in 2019, people already protested against measles vaccinations by showing up at a US Senate hearing wearing T-shirts that read, ‘I call the shots: My body, my choice. My kids, my choice’ (Solis, 2019). Here, the slogan is combined with ‘my kids my choice’ as an implied intention to protect the life of children which rhetorically paves the way for an association of the slogan with pro-life claims despite its pro-choice origins.

The appropriation of the slogan in the anti-vaccine context is a double move. On one hand, building on the culturally resonant master frame of the original slogan allows anti-vaccine protesters to effectively politicise vaccination, which – as Solis points out – was until then largely thought of as an apolitical, private, and individual decision (Solis, 2019). As such, it is a form of claim-making that politicises a new cause on the back of the struggle for bodily autonomy as a civic right in feminist movements. Therein, it mobilises the implicit memory of a longer history of struggle which renders the phrase recognisable as a political claim. As a form of mnemonic appropriation, however, it is not only a tool of self-legitimation but also a means to corrode and attack the reproductive rights movement whose slogan it appropriates. Unlike Pegida’s appropriation of ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (see Richardson-Little and Merrill, 2020), already mentioned, the aim here is not to let the memory of the slogan’s progressive use function as a reputational shield. Instead, the appropriation tarnishes the reputation of reproductive rights activists themselves. In a rhetorical backwards somersault, anti-covid restriction activists equate the right to go out unmasked or unvaccinated during a pandemic with the right to abortion, while simultaneously advocating for the former and against the latter. The argument is that those who are pro-choice should be for any kind of individual choice and the implication is that it is hypocritical to have both abortion rights and a lockdown.

This is explicitly formulated by protesters in how they account for their use of the slogan. At a small-scale protest in the American town of Richmond in April 2020, one of the demonstrators was quoted as saying:

I have the right to choose to go out if I choose to expose myself. It’s my body, . . . it’s funny how you trust people to kill a baby but you don’t trust them to leave their home. (Vozella and Schneider, 2020)

The slogan is used as a direct attack and considered an ironic ( ‘funny’) means of exposing a supposed hypocrisy, a hypocrisy that is here constructed rhetorically by contrasting two different claims to free choice. The choice to terminate an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is presented as the taking of a life ( ‘kill a baby’), while violating public health regulations meant to protect others is presented as the more mundane and seemingly harmless freedom of people leaving their home. Other anti-vaccine demonstrators even explicitly referred to their use of the slogan as an ‘ironic’ means to expose what they perceive as hypocrisy. As a journalist’s report on the Defeat the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles illustrates, one demonstrator explained why he is wearing a ‘my body my choice’ T-shirt (complete with an image of a cartoon syringe) in these terms:

It was ‘an ironic thing’, he said, meant to expose what he sees as the hypocrisy of Democrats who support both abortion and vaccine mandates. Blodget said he is ‘pro-life’. (Bluth, 2022)

In this example, the antagonism is not aimed at pro-choice feminists but at ‘Democrats’, making Covid-19 vaccination a party-political issue that is rallied around in an explicit attempt to undermine abortion legislation. The explicit aim of the ironic uptake of the slogan is to create an equivalency between the right to refuse the Covid-19 vaccine and the right to abortion. This allows demonstrators to discredit the reproductive rights movement on account of inconsistency, here articulated as hypocrisy. The false equivalency between public health (vaccine refusal) and private health (the decision to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy) does not hold for pro-choice advocates who frame the latter as a public health issue as well. As pro-life bioethicists have shown, ‘pro-life advocates commonly argue for the immorality of abortion based on the fetus possessing the same moral status as children and adults’, consequently, they view abortion as a ‘public health crisis’ (Blackshaw and Rodger, 2021: 465). The equivalency proposed by the appropriation is casually passed off as merely an ‘ironic thing’, corroborating the idea that the weaponisation of irony has become a typical right-wing discursive tactic (Nagle, 2017).

In 2022, by the time that the Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked that would eventually reverse Roe v. Wade, many anti-vaxxers publicly rejoiced. A tweet by conservative comedian Steven Crowder, quoted in one article, said that he could not contain his excitement at the decision:

If you support a national vaccine mandate, but shout ‘my body, my choice!’ in support of aborting of a baby with its OWN AUTONOMOUSLY BEATING HEART . . . you might be an evil asshole. (Jankowicz, 2022)

Here, suddenly, the indexical referentiality of the slogan is used to call into question whose bodily autonomy is at stake – which drives the false equivalency between vaccine mandates and abortion rights – is pushed further in the pro-life position expressed by the capitalised ‘autonomously beating heart’. This uses the pro-choice slogan’s metonymic logic against itself: where originally the body stands for the parent’s body, here the heart comes to stand for the baby’s body, which is framed as autonomous and therefore – following the original slogan’s logic – deserving of the same rights. The contested metonymy of the slogan has always been at the centre of the abortion rights debate with pro-life activists often replying with the counter-slogan ‘it’s not your body, it’s the baby’s body’. While the latter is a so-called counter-frame meant to ‘rebut, undermine or neutralize . . . a group’s interpretive framework’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 626), the verbatim appropriation of the original slogan has the same effect using a movement’s own words against them, making it a hostile form of frame appropriation, which is mnemonic in that it attacks a cultural carrier of the memory of feminism.

Interestingly, comments also increasingly make it seem as if pro-choice advocates themselves, instead of government legislators, were solely responsible for vaccine mandates and lockdown restrictions. The same article also quotes a Telegram post that was shared on the day of the draft leak by the anti-vaccine campaigner Erin Elizabeth:

‘It is just so preposterous to me that the people saying “my body my choice” are the same ones who demanded that we be vaccinated in order to go to our jobs or in order for our children to go to school’, she said. (Jankowicz, 2022)

In these last two examples, the slogan is not used to advocate for the right to bodily autonomy for vaccine refusers in a direct way, but it is used indirectly as an attack on the reproductive rights movement by characterising those who use ‘my body my choice’ as pro-vaccine in order to highlight a perceived hypocrisy. Here, the contrast set up is one between dutiful hardworking Americans who want to protect their children and pro-choice advocates who seem to be personally demanding that these people stay home or get vaccinated. As discussed above, the protection of children is a recurring theme in the anti-vaccine movement since 2019 and here it is again brought to bear on the abortion debate by mobilising the implication that people who accept the lockdowns do not care about the lives of children. The mobilisation of a ‘right to work’ frame, also expressed in appropriated slogan adaptations like ‘my body my choice to work’ (Tyree and Eaker, 2020), undermines the social status of pro-choice campaigners in an American culture that highly valorises hard work, ambition and a strong work ethic. These comments channel outrage about vaccine mandates and redirect that anger, implicitly or explicitly, towards pro-choice campaigners.

A cognitive linguist quoted in a 2022 article by the left-leaning American media organisation NPR, claims the appropriation was highly effective since it changed perceptions of the word ‘choice’ (on lexical memory work, see also Van den Elzen, 2024, in this issue). The word ‘now evokes an image of an isolated decision that doesn’t affect the broader community’ consequently framing ‘an abortion seeker as self-centred, and a vaccine rejector as an individual making a personal health choice’ (Bluth, 2022).

Beyond linguistics, anti-vaccination activists are playing politics, intentionally trolling the abortion rights groups by using their words against them, Wulf said. ‘I really believe there’s a little bit of an “eff you” in that’, Wulf said. ‘We’re going to take your phrase’. (Bluth, 2022)

The idea expressed here is that the uptake of the slogan is hostile in that it intends to attack the reproductive rights movement by undermining the value of one of the key slogans that belongs to a feminist repertoire of contention, with feminist movements developing a sense of mnemonic ownership over the slogan throughout its usage for over half a century. Despite widely broadcast criticism of the appropriation of the slogan in countless media outlets, which invariably stresses how it creates a false analogy by glossing over the distinction between public and private health (Wiseman, 2021), the last two years have seen the rolling back of both Covid-19 restrictions and reproductive rights and has led to the increased criticism of the slogan within reproductive rights movements themselves. Ultimately, this suggests that the hostile appropriation of a slogan that had become a portable monument of feminist memory has been very effective at tarnishing that monument.

The credibility of a collective action frame relies on ‘three factors; frame consistency, empirical credibility, and credibility of the frame articulators or claim-makers’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619). The mnemonic appropriation of ‘my body my choice’ and its attendant master frame of individual choice and bodily autonomy has corroded the credibility of the reproductive rights movement and their main frame by casting doubt on all three of these factors. Hijacking or even temporarily monopolising the slogan’s use for a different and hostile political cause tarnishes the slogan’s frame consistency of affiliated feminist usage. Demonstrators who appropriate the slogan also try to expose or even fabricate ‘apparent contradictions among beliefs and claims’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619). For instance, when they equate the right to remain unvaccinated and go out during a pandemic with the right to abortion, which implies that those who stand for reproductive rights should also support vaccine, lockdown and mask mandate non-compliance. Second, vaccine demonstrators sometimes explicitly call into question the empirical credibility of the claim to personhood, expressed as whose body has the right to autonomy and self-determination, the baby’s or the parent’s (for instance, in the example referring to a baby’s autonomously beating heart). Third, the perceived credibility of the original frame articulators is undermined, for instance, in those examples where reproductive rights advocates are discursively construed as personally responsible for lockdown restrictions and vaccine mandates or when they are portrayed as people who do not care for children and their right to go to school nor for workers and their moral duty to contribute to the national economy.

Specifically in the US context, the appropriation has contributed to advocates for reproductive rights questioning the aptness of the collective action frame proposed by the slogan. The last years have seen a rapid increase in articles from a pro-choice perspective (see Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts, 2021; Shane, 2022; You, 2023) that claim, on various grounds, that the slogan frames the abortion debate in the wrong and counterproductive terms or that the slogan obscures how bodies are socially located and constituted by specific material and political conditions. These authors mostly point out that the proprietary logic of ownership and privacy is both legally counterproductive and not inclusive enough, noting that ‘self-ownership is as inequitably distributed as wealth in the United States’ (Lanphier, 2021). In other words, the slogan ignores how the choice for abortion – even if it is legal – is still not equally available to all as access to healthcare itself is unevenly distributed due to wealth discrepancies, differences in employment status or citizenship status, and the legacies of racism and discrimination. It is important to note that this criticism is not new since calls for a focus on race, ability, social class and gender had already been made for decades by the reproductive justice movement, which was predominantly led by activists of colour and aimed to move beyond the pro-choice framework of reproductive rights to one of social justice (see also Ross and Solinger, 2017).

The slogan’s appropriation further intensified the feminist critique of the master frame of individual choice, meaning that the hostile uptake helped undermine the resonance of that frame for the reproductive rights movement by contaminating the slogan through its ‘ironic’ usage. The mnemonic appropriation of ‘my body my choice’, in a sense, ‘defaced’ an important portable monument of pro-choice feminism as pro-life protesters publicly tried to vandalise the slogan. However, the challenge to this monument of feminist history now also serves as a prompt to remember earlier feminist critiques of the language of choice since it revived the debates over the adequacy of this framework for reproductive rights. In recent campaigns, organisations like the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts are even actively discouraging pro-choice language while suggesting slogans that emphasise community and access, such as ‘bans off our bodies’ or ‘protect abortion access’. Alternative slogans, expressing an alternative frame might also lead to different future legislation, where legal access to abortion is perhaps not legislated as a civil right but, rather, as a human right (see also Berer, 2023). Legal scholars have advocated for decades to frame and legislate the right to abortion not as a constitutional civil right to privacy (as Roe v. Wade did) but in more legally robust terms ‘as a question not of liberty but of equality’ (Roosevelt, 2003; see also MacKinnon, 1987). ⁴ A renewed focus on equality, community, and access could be a good way to go forward, and finding new monuments for feminism might be an important part of this struggle.

Conclusion

The mnemonic appropriation of ‘my body my choice’ in the context of anti-vaccine and anti-covid restriction protests has a double function. It politicises vaccine, facemask, and lockdown refusal on the back of claims to bodily autonomy formulated in the reproductive rights movement while simultaneously attacking that movement. This shows that the cultural memory of activism is not only a powerful resource for affiliated protest in the present, it can also be used in the backlash against movements. For instance, when powerful elements from the repertoire of contention – such as protest slogans handed down from the past and believed to belong to certain movements for whom they function as portable monuments – are appropriated by detractors to roll back historically hard-won rights.

This article has identified protest slogans as an important form of activist cultural production and claim-making that can shed new light on the role of mnemonic appropriation in the memory-activism nexus (Rigney, 2018, 2020). It has shown that protest slogans with long histories of usage can become carriers of the cultural memory of activism as portable monuments. What is ‘carried’ by the slogan as an aesthetic, cultural form with its own agency, viscosity, and distributive affordances, as well as by the people adopting that slogan in affiliated protests, is the implicit rather than explicit memory of a diffuse, longer history of struggle itself. Protest slogans also function as collective action frames that have a particular mnemonic salience for affiliated movements. The appropriation of these frames by detractors can undermine the credibility of the original movements that used them. Drawing on framing theory, the discursive mechanisms identified in hostile mnemonic appropriation highlight inconsistencies in the original movement’s claims, casting doubt on the empirical veracity of those claims, and undermining the credibility of the social movement actors who articulate these claims.

Hostile mnemonic appropriation can call into question a movement’s perceived legitimacy and credibility, which can have profound real-world political consequences. The strategy of mnemonic appropriation, in fact, has become a key tactic and something of a tradition among ‘trolling’ right-wing and populist-inflected movements (Đureinović, 2022; Nagle, 2017). While right-wing movements are not culturally homogeneous, and certain countries are more predisposed than others to being susceptible to anti-status quo discourses (Foster and Feldman, 2021), these movements do continue to surge across the world. This makes it an important task for memory scholars to unpack the dynamics and political effects of mnemonic appropriation.