The Effect of Affect: Hostile Rhetoric in Abortion Discourses

Kerry Smith

Advisor: McKinley Green, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Heidi Lawrence, Courtney Adams Wooten

Horizon Hall, #4225
April 13, 2026, 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

Abstract:

While over 60 percent of Americans support legalizing abortion with varying restrictions and moral positions (Hartig, 2022), the public discourse surrounding it remains divisive and anger-driven (Condit, 2022). Since the 1980s, abortion has morphed into a majorly partisan issue (Sullivan, 2022). The divisive and emotionally charged rhetoric surrounding abortion has been on full display since the Dobbs decision in 2024. This dissertation explores how hostility as a rhetorical construct can create new avenues for understanding the contentious nature of abortion discourse. Hostile rhetoric describes discourse that aims to persuade by agitating and mobilizing affects such as anger, fear, disgust, cynicism, irritation, offense, or indignation. While more explicit examples of hostility around abortion have received attention in both popular (Collins, 2024; Daxecker et al., 2025; Whalin, 2024) and academic (Hsu, 2022; Yam, 2016; Zhang & Clar, 2018) conversations, this dissertation explores hostility that is agitated and mobilized specifically in legal and legislative settings. Using affect theory and intersectional feminist perspectives, this dissertation analyzes hostile rhetoric in legal and legislative language from three sources: the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs majority decision, the Arkansas Monument to the Unborn Act, and the Texas Heartbeat Act. The findings from the analysis outline three central strategies of hostile rhetoric in these contexts: rhetorical obfuscation, affective commonplaces, and mobilizing feeling bodies. Naming hostility as a framework for understanding rhetorical interaction around abortion yields avenues for intervention and inventing different ways of understanding abortion discourses and the rhetoricity of hostility.