The (un)Funny side of Memes : reproduction of symbolic violence against women through Memes

• Main Author: Ang, James
• Other Authors: Paul Kohl
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66147
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study seeks to understand the portrayal of women and racial minorities in memes and uncover if such portrayals reproduces symbolic violence against women. By using content analysis to analyze 248 memes and Stuart Hall encoding/decoding model to code 22 comments, the findings revealed sexism and misogyny to be rampant against women in memes, while racism is largely contested. The contrast between the treatments of both groups emphasized the lack of resistance towards the negative and positive representation of women. Symbolic violence is thus enacted through such weak resistance to such representations and the users’ imposition of their definition of negative and positive women in memes.