![]() ![]() As such, they often do not “form” our opinions so much as they reflect and amplify them. Memes circulate within these bubbles and rarely pass through these filters. We live in filter bubbles and social media echo chambers that are genuinely difficult to break out of if we want to encounter perspectives other than our own mirrored back at us. I say “form” political opinions, but this is not quite the correct term. One of the main conversations that rose from the 2016 election is our tendency to fixate on woman candidates’ likeability instead of their capability to do the job. Memes are part of this discourse, and they perpetuate these harmful stereotypes and form political opinions. These memes tend to fixate on things like her appearance, the infamous emails, her intelligence, and her husband’s infidelity. This becomes the overarching message behind negative Hillary Clinton memes: not only is she is not a “good” woman, but as a woman she is unfit to run the country. Through memetic representation, women are told how it is acceptable to behave. Something that all of these memes have in common is that they serve as indicators of what a heteronormative “good” woman is in a patriarchal society. As I demonstrated in my dissertation, women are often depicted as objects of male fantasy, as undesirable, or as lacking intelligence (Sparby, 2017a). In addition, it’s no secret that women often get a short shrift when it comes to memetic representation. These kinds of memes have the power to preclude possibilities for productive discourse, which in the heat of the 2016 election turned out to be quite dangerous to democracy. I use “innocuous” and “dangerous” here intentionally. They are often light trolling at their most innocuous and downright inflammatory at their most dangerous. These memes often depict recognizable political figures in the center, and the text can include anything from hostile invective or sharp critique to high praise or support. When it comes to political memes from around the 2016 election, a number of both analog and digital memetic artifacts circulated, including MAGA hats, phrases like “basket of deplorables,” gifs of Trump tackling news logos, and image macro memes -the latter of which I will analyze in this presentation. With the rise of digital technologies we’ve moved well beyond this analogic definition, but the core-the transmission of cultural information-remains intact. When Richard Dawkins (1976) coined the term long before the social web was even a conceivable reality, he defined it as cultural information spread from person to person (like genes, but with culture). Before I begin, it might be useful to provide a working definition of memes, because they can take many forms. I can talk some preliminary thoughts in the Q&A if anyone is interested. It really came down to, this is going to be kind of a surface level examination, and I’m okay with giving the old white lady the surface level treatment, but the women of color memes deserve a fuller look because there are so many more intersecting oppressions to unpack. I also wanted to bring in some memes with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters but in the interest of time could not. As such, this presentation pulls these three threads together, examining Hillary Clinton memes to reveal how memes function as demagoguery and propaganda that aim to spread disinformation. As a rhetorical meme scholar, I’m interested in how memes are used as vehicles for political disruption as an intersectional feminist, I’m interested in how women are disproportionately affected by memetic representation as an activist, I’m interested in how we can make meaningful interventions. Presidential election, memes were circulated in support of or opposition to political candidates, and many of these memes became key polarizing sources of disinformation. ![]()
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