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 heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces.

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More recent years have begun to see a shift in focus in academic writing towards the rather neglected topic of female aggression and violence (for example, Campbell, 1993(for example, Campbell, , 1995Burbank, 1994). Furthermore, some feminists have highlighted the benefits of drawing attention towards women's aggression for feminist agendas (for example, Campbell, 1993;White and Kowalski, 1994). However, much of the existing work in this area situates women's aggression in the context of normative heterosexual relationships and domestic domains, meaning that women's aggression and violence in other (more public) contexts is often overlooked. This omission is puzzling now given that women are entering into more public domains and spaces which have historically been dominated by men (for example, Kua, 1994) and reports that most incidents where women report being attacked by other women take place in the context of pubs or clubs (Home Office, 1993). As such, this study examines women's talk around aggression in the context of 'nights out'. In sum, it is argued here that physical aggression can be understood as playing an important role in the construction of working-class femininities in ways that 'make sense' in local classed contexts, thus emphasizing the importance of contextual understandings of women's aggression.

Discourse analysis is a useful and flexible method for exploring power and identity. While there are many ways of doing discourse analysis, all agree that discourse is the central site of identity construction. However, recent feminist concerns over power, agency, and resistance have drawn attention to the absence of participants' first-hand experiences within broad discursive accounts (Lafrance & McKenzie-Mohr, 2014; Saukko, 2008). For those with an interest in power relations, such as feminist researchers, this is a problematic silence which renders the personal functions of discourse invisible. In this paper, we argue that the 'personal' and 'political' are inextricable, and make a case for putting the 'personal' into broader discursive frameworks of understanding. Further, we assert that feminist research seeking to account for identity must much more explicitly aim to capture this interplay. To this end we argue that voice is the key site of meaning where this interplay can be captured, but that no clear analytical framework currently exists for producing such an account. In response, we propose Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA) as a voice-centered analytical approach for engaging with experience and discourse in talk. We then set out clear guidance on how to do FRDA, as applied in the context of women working in UK policing. Finally, we conclude that by prioritizing voice, FRDA invites new and politicized feminist readings of power, agency, and resistance, where the voices of participants remain central to the discursive accounts of researchers.

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