“Carefully drawing on media histories and visual cultures across techno-scapes, MacDonald’s work on memes shows us the importance of looking closely at contemporary social media reassembly of mediated reality, leading us to consider important shifts in emerging technologies through a feminist lens.” —Radhika Gajjala, author of Digital Diasporas: Labor and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics
“Using bricolage, assemblage, Dadaism, and other aesthetic practices as analytical lenses, MacDonald proves that memetic practices of resistance are not new, but extensions of existing performance-based resistance. In a politically troubling and mediated time, The Art of Memes has much to contribute to our understanding of political action and discourse.” —Heather Suzanne Woods, coauthor of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right
In The Art of Memes in Feminist Digital Culture, Shana MacDonald argues that memes are a unique medium of communication that both respond to and reflect the current cultural moment. The book—the first to treat memes as a unique medium of communication distinct from other internet and digital media—examines feminist and queer activist uses of memes as a form of digital resistance, demonstrating through collage, reenactment, and montage that countercultural meme makers intervene in the status quo and offer cultural critiques with potentially broad circulation. In this way, MacDonald situates memes as part of a lineage of aesthetic resistance, exploring the operational logic of bricolage, intertextuality, and intermediality within contemporary internet meme cultures on the left.
MacDonald examines memes from feminist, queer, antiracist, and anticapitalist accounts on Instagram, as well as how meme genres and themes shift when they travel across different platforms and subcultures. By considering memes as a medium, she sheds light on how they operate within contemporary digital culture as a beacon for online public discourse that pushes against dominant norms.
Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. She is the coeditor of Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies as well as Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices and Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction Countercultural Aesthetics and Medium Specificity in the Digital Era
Chapter 1 Collage, Juxtaposition, and Spatial Collapse
Chapter 2 Reenactment, Nostalgia, and Performative Ruptures
Chapter 3 Montage and the Memetic Assemblage of Attractions
Conclusion Embracing the Pleasure Activism of Joyscrolling
Acknowlegments
Works Cited
Index
