‘Kim Davis be like … ’: a feminist critique of gender humor in online political memes (original) (raw)
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The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heter...
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In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in internet memes in order to illuminate the lived, felt dimensions of progressive politics at a historical moment when those politics seem especially imperiled. The author argues for an understanding of online engagements with politics as being borne of oscillation as users move between platforms as well as affective states. The goal: to underscore how anger and laughter provide progressives with different opportunities to weather, make fun of, and combat the ascendancy of right-wing populism. Rooted in literature on affect and scholarship on internet memes, especially feminist internet memes, the article examines several different memes that circulated between 2016 and 2020, including #pussygrabsback, #neverthelessshepersisted, Prankster Joe Biden memes, and Creepy Joe Biden memes.
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In this chapter we look at three different manifestations of social media feminist humour that challenge rejections of feminism or anti-feminism. First we look at the hugely popular twitter account @NoToFeminism, which posts witty rejoinders to anti-feminist discourses, and was initiated specifically to parody the #womenagainstfeminism movement. Next, we examine the twitter hashtag #FeministsAreUgly, to consider how feminists have intervened into the sexist logic that women are feminists because they are sexually undesirable to men. We consider the affordances of the hashtag to stimulate discussion and debate around conventional beauty norms and also how hashtags can be co-opted in ways that mutate far outside its original aims. The hashtag was created in 2014 as a way for people of colour to speak back against beauty standards and cultural privilege and we problematize how it has now potentially become a site of enforcing, and validating the exact same beauty norms it was designed to interrogate. Finally, we explore ‘misandry’ Twitter hashtags and Tumblr posts which ironically present female superiority in an attempt to parody anti-feminist claims that feminists are man-hating. This tongue in cheek action can be considered a way of mocking wilful misunderstandings of feminism. We also, however, consider whether some of the memes celebrate violence against men in gender binary and essentialising ways. Overall we argue that social media affordances offer women opportunities to defend feminism, in novel and exciting ways that move us beyond simplistic claims that we are in any way living in a postfeminist moment without sustained feminist political dialogue and critique.
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We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilis- ing the derisive laughter that energises current feminisms. Using the 2012 case of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, we argue that feminist memes create online spaces of consciousness raising and community building. The timeliness, humorous affect and media techne ́ of meme propagators become significant infrastructures for feminist cri- tique, what we term ‘doing feminism in the network’. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, as others argue, we illustrate how the networking and distribution capacities of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and the online shopping site Amazon.com also cultivate new modes of fem- inist cultural critique and models of political agency for practising feminism through meme production and propagation.
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Statements made during each of the presidential debates in the 2012 election cycle sparked an outpouring of responses via social media. Many of these responses took the form of often-humorous "memes" -remixed images, hashtags, and the like -which rapidly spread via online social networks. A small but growing field of literature indicates such so-called Internet memes are a social phenomenon of a participatory media culture, with implications for identity building, public discourse, and critique of traditional media institutions. Additionally, while memes have their origin in sub-cultural spaces of the Internet, they have received a growing amount of attention in mainstream media outlets. Previous research has shown that press coverage framing of new technologies can influence the way such technologies are diffused and used. A presidential election is arguably one of the most important events on which members of the press in a democracy such as the United States report, with implications for the direction of the country for the next four years. The present study is a preliminary study of how mainstream press and broadcast coverage frames Internet as a form of civic participation in a Web 2.0 culture. Results of the preliminary study do not suggest mainstream media are acting as opinion leaders for the diffusion of memes as a type of civic participation. Suggestions for future research in this area are offered.
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Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as " big data " analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for " silly " content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged during the 2016 US presidential election: Hillary Clinton referring to Trump supporters as a " basket of deplorables " and Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton a " nasty woman " during a televised debate. Taking a " small data " approach, we find funny content enacting meaningful political work including expressions of opposition, political identification, and displays of civic support. Furthermore, comparing humor style between partisan cases shows the partial-but incomplete-breakdown of humor's notoriously firm boundaries. Partisan patterns reveal that the meeting of humor and social media leave neither unchanged.