Old jokes, new media – Online sexism and constructions of gender in Internet memes

Abstract

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.

Gendered (in)visibility in digital media contexts

“…The feminist perspective on gende red digital visibility is represented by crit ical analyses of postfeminist gendered selfpresentations in social media (Bruce, 2016;Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018), research analyzing the potential and practice of dig ital feminist activism (ClarkParsons, 2018;Gabriel, 2016;Jackson, 2018;Jackson, Bai ley, & Foucault Welles, 2018;Linabary, Cor ple, & Cooky, 2019;Mendes et al, 2018;Myles, 2019;Pruchniewska, 2019;Turley & Fisher, 2018) and studies uncovering the threats to feminist activism such as on line harassment (Drakett, Rickett, Day, & Milnes, 2018;Massanari, 2017;VeraGray, 2017) and abuse (Eckert, 2018;Mendes, Keller, & Ringrose, 2019;StubbsRichard son, Rader, & Cosby, 2018).…”

“…Additionally, in social media women are faced with rape threats that are neu tralized by elements of humor such as the use of emoticons (Drakett et al, 2018). In this way, and similar to using justifications and excuses in hate comments against other vulnerable social groups (Wilhelm, Joeckel, & Ziegler, 2020), violence against women is downplayed, which is likely to increase the acceptance of such posts by a wider audience.…”

“…Digital public spaces offer women possibilities of mak ing their opinions and identities visible (Duguay, 2016;Mendes et al, 2018;Sobi raj, 2018). Feminist activists can initiate counterdiscourses through subversion or denouncement of harmful social me dia content such as problematic memes (Drakett et al, 2018), sexism, and rape cul ture (Turley & Fisher, 2018). Disclosure of gendered power relations, e. g., sharing ex periences of sexual violence, can be seen as the first step to create new digital nar ratives on gender relations (Mendes et al, 2019).…”

Estereotipos sobre los chinos en México: de la imagen caricaturesca al meme de internet

“…El significado se transforma por el simple hecho de compartir, ya que, de nuevo, genera y crea cultura. A pesar de la dificultad que las preguntas anteriores sugieren, investigaciones recientes han hecho esfuerzos por mitigar tales complejidades con artículos que abordan la violencia de distinta naturaleza y el racismo en las redes sociales (Drakett et al, 2018; Estereotipos sobre los chinos en México: de la imagen caricaturesca • Miguel lisbona guillén/ al meme en internet enrique rodríguez balaM de Hong Kong desde arriba "¡La gente de Hong Kong ha tenido suficiente!" dice el comercial.…”

Text Analytics in Gender Studies. Introduction.

“…This themed section is doubly focusedon both methodology and techniques used to address crucial topics at the core of the discussion on gender. So, the first contribution, using a lexicometric approach, offers a highlight on different ways to approach gender issues at international level, analysing the articles published in the last two decades by the International Review of Sociology; the second one, analysing the semantic of Tweets, using a multimodal content analysis, shows the growing privatization of LGBTQI+ movements and the growing strengthening of gender hierarchies and heteronormativity; the third one, sheds light on a topic that is relatively under-investigated: the hate speech populating the social media that reframes misogyny as 'acceptable' by constructing it as a form of humour (Drakett, Rickett, Day, & Milnes, 2018). The last contribution focuses on the press's language about immigrants and refugees in Spain, adopting a gender perspective.…”