Comic Memes and Sexist Humor in India: Tools for Reinforcement of Female Body-Image Stereotypes

Title

Comic Memes and Sexist Humor in India: Tools for Reinforcement of Female Body-Image Stereotypes

Creator

Deepali Mallya M.; Dennis R.

Description

Memes have been described as communicative and aesthetic practices that serve cultural, social, political purpose on a digital platform. Several studies, in the last decade, have attempted to study this digital aesthetic knowledge production as a powerful tool for political, racial, and gender-related discourses. Most often this knowledge is produced through comic multi-media texts. Many theorists believe that, digital media reinforces inequality, marginalization and such other social issues through the audio-visual-textual medium as much as it establishes the counter-discourses for equality, body activism, racial activism and the like. Speed and lack of censorship can be the cardinal reasons for the popularity of these memes. Among the mass-influencing gender-related memes are those encouraging fat-talk and body-image stereotypes. In the Indian context, 'Tag a Friend' memes is one such widely circulated meme which communicates body-shaming messages through sexist humor. It mainly targets the fat/colored/transgender women. The current study examines these memes using multimodal discourse analysis methodology. The paper attempts to investigate the revival/reproduction potential of color-shaming and body-shaming stereotypes via comic memes through Shiffman's memetic dimensions. The analysis establishes that memes can be a prominent site for the re-production of the problematic ideology of body/color shaming even in the 21st century. AesthetixMS 2021

Source

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol-13, No. 4

Date

2021-01-01

Publisher

Aesthetics Media Services

Subject

Body-shaming; Comic-meme; Female-body; Ideology; Interpellation; Tag a Friend

Coverage

Deepali Mallya M., Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ (Deemed to be) University, Karnataka, Bengaluru, India; Dennis R., Oasis International School, Karnataka, Bengaluru, India

Rights

All Open Access; Gold Open Access

Relation

ISSN: 9752935

Format

Online

Language

English

Type

Article

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.21659/RUPKATHA.V13N4.15

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85122581526&doi=10.21659%2fRUPKATHA.V13N4.15&partnerID=40&md5=9d56bb6e5b030156c5d3bb6ab2e1de28