Author(s)

Anja Housden Brooks

AHSS, ARU, Cambridge, UK.

The news constructed language in the beginning of the COVID-19 narrative was characterized by the strategic construction of meaning and the use of specific narratives used to shape societal perceptions and influence responses to the virus. The discourse on COVID-19 employed specific narratives that were designed to strengthen the bonds between men and women through increased intimacy amidst the onset of the virus, which was fundamental to the UK’s response. Sky News narratives were disseminated across many countries and played a crucial role in shaping societal perceptions and influencing responses to the pandemic on a wider scale to manage conflict through the construction of meaning, using discursive devices to shape the narrative and influence the masse. The simple life, family values and a back to nature approach were just some of the sub discourses that make up the master discourse of intimacy. Intimacy had become somewhat of a taboo post-millennium what with the onslaught of sadistic internet forms of male on female pornography—and the general mainstreaming of the sex industry—and was hidden from dominant ways of seeing prevalent in the Western post-millennial context. In this essay, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is used to understand the discourse of news construction as a social practice in which language plays a central role, emphasized by a post-structuralist paradigm. The arrival of Covid came with an unexpected change in the cultural dynamics between men and women, transgressing the language of lost rapport left by the sex industry and its gendered hierarchies between the sexes in late capitalism.

COVID-19 Narratives, Transgression, Sex Industry, News Construction, Intimacy, Woman, Language of Togetherness, Late Capitalism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Intimacy

Brooks, A. (2024) The Language of Togetherness: Woman, Intimacy, and the Early COVID-19 Western Narrative. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 12, 10-19. doi: 10.4236/jss.2024.123002.