| dc.description.abstract | Given data about vaccine hesitancy in mid-2021, efforts for herd immunity against the
COVID-19 pandemic are being threatened by low vaccination rates of rural white, non-college educated conservatives. As a result, country music stars partnered with Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) to create pro-vaccine public service announcements targeting predominately white, conservative, rural, working-class audiences. A discourse analysis of the PSAs revealed the ways in which the individual actors and institutions promoted COVID-19 vaccines by constructing rhetorical imagined users that reproduced hegemonic whiteness ideologies via vaccinations. The study found that country music PSAs’ characterization of imagined users implicated courage, intelligence, autonomy, and individualism—the “Informed Bootstrapper.” Informed by marketing research into real white, rural, American conservative values, the imagined usership of COVID-19 vaccines through country music PSAs embodies traditional neoliberal and masculinity scripts as persuasive techniques towards increasing vaccination rates. These findings suggest that the uptake of science and technology have relied on the maintenance of social scripts rooted in harmful structures of whiteness. In future health communications, I suggest using familiar, community-oriented values and spokespeople with thoughtful, proactive messaging to reach white rural, middle and lower class Americans in a way that makes incremental change towards dismantling whiteness normativity in the United States. | |
