'The Feminism Police Won't Tell Me': Fictional Quotations as a Means for Confrontational Ideological Positioning

Abstract

This paper examines the pragmatic function of fictional quotations as a means for ideological positioning in a controversial 2018 interview between journalist Sharon Shpurer and Knesset member Merav Michaeli. The core conflict revolves around negotiating the definition of “who is a feminist,” with each participant attempting to position herself as more consistent. Adopting a functional-discursive approach to quotation analysis, I demonstrate how participants use fictional quotations not to report prior speech events but to challenge each other’s feminist credentials and establish second-order positioning. The analysis reveals various strategies: quoting ideological authorities, creating potential utterances that establish feminist ideals the other fails to meet, using double-voiced quotations echoing extreme views, and constructing dialogues where one reformulates the other’s statements. Notably, these quotations rarely serve for initial challenging but primarily function to reject initial positioning and establish counter-positioning. Despite the confrontational nature of the exchange, the quotations simultaneously reveal deep ideological alignment about feminist principles. This study contributes to pragmatic-linguistic research by illuminating how quotations encode ideology and examining linguistic patterns characteristic of feminist discourse during the Me Too era.