Women Representation in Crisis Memes – Humour and Beyond: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

During social, economic or natural crises, people embrace unpredicted personal attitudes and social behaviour. Amid the absurdity of the Covid-19 pandemic context, humour could be detected as means of adaptation and coping mechanism as well as a platform of social critique. As a result of the intricate nature of human communication and technological advancement, variable forms of humour are produced. Memes are humorous viral forms of expression based on mutation and intertextuality. Surfing a number of pandemic memes on a variety of websites, it has been noticed that particular social and psychological outlines are employed when representing the impact of the pandemic on the social behaviour and personal attitude of women. Based on Attardo & Raskin’s (1991) General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), and Machin & Mayr’s (2012) iconography and attributes semiosis, the paper attempts to reveal the ideological bearings of the pragma-semiotic structure in selected pandemic memes. Examining the representation of women in 30 memes on Covid-19 pandemic, the study reveals that memes are not mere digital artefacts with humorous bearing; they are digital relics of profound pragmatic and semiotic bearings. They are built mainly on incongruous scripts that construct distorted, dehumanized, or unstable identities of the represented female figures. The satirical effect is heightened by employing visual templates of semiotic iconographies with negative social and personal attributes. Hence, memes have proven to be stancebuilding arenas that contribute to the recursive construction and recognition of social identities.