© Erika M. Sparby
PRESENTATION MATERIALS
CONFERENCE ON COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION 2017
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Erika M. Sparby
Conference on College Composition and Communication
March 17, 2017
Meming/Counter-Meming: Remixing Negative Memes to Deconstruct Stereotypes
My research broadly studies the intersections of gender and sexual identity and digital communication. My dissertation, Memes and 4chan and Haters, Oh My! Rhetoric, Identity, and Online Aggression, takes a rhetorical approach to studying online aggression. Frequently, targets of aggression are told not to “feed the trolls,” or not to respond to aggressive content lest they fuel further aggressive acts. However, this tactic does not work. First, it blames targets for further aggressive acts, not the aggressors; second, trolls and other online aggressors have set up a game that is impossible to win because no matter how you respond (or don’t) you are giving them what they want. If you ignore trolls, they have successfully silenced you. If you respond, you give them the reaction they need to escalate the situation. The trolls always get the last word. My research examines methods for responding to and resisting online aggression without amplifying it.
Today I am presenting material from my first chapter, “Meming and Counter-Meming: Remixing Digital Media to Challenge Gender Stereotypes.” This chapter examines how certain image macro memes use stereotypes to reinforce negative identity representations, and explores counter-meming as a method for resistance. Today I will talk about memes’ tendency to exploit stereotypes to gain a cheap laugh, then I will explore counter-meming as a method of resistance. I end by turning toward the writing classroom, illustrating why teaching our students to meme is becoming increasingly important, especially for those who intend to pursue careers in digital and professional writing.
Memes are images, videos, and other kinds of digital media that spread online. Image macros are specific kinds of memes that include an image—usually of a person or animal—with text superimposed on the top and bottom, often with the goal of making a joke. What began as a medium designed to propagate jokes online has evolved into a powerful form of public writing. Ryan Milner’s study of Occupy Wall Street memes looks at how users on all sides of the movement engaged with it through memes. He argues that they lead to polyvocality in the public sphere because they act as a “common language” with which people can have discussions on a global scale. Similarly, Stephanie Vie’s study of the Human Rights Campaign logo as digital activism on Facebook shows that memes provide a voice to the public. Milner and Vie both illustrate that much of the power memes hold stems from their universality: public audiences can consume and remix them uncritically and unreflectively.
Limor Shifman also acknowledges that memes can provide a platform for public expression, but she cautions that they can also continue traditions of silencing marginalized voices. She argues that if memes engage in damaging cultural assumptions, they can be dangerous because they perpetuate negative stereotypes. Alas, although memes have the power to exercise positive social influence, not all memes harness this power for good: many hinge on stereotypes to gain a cheap laugh and marginalize identities. When an image macro depicts a human instead of an animal, it often serves to propagate negative identity representations. Any identity can be the subject of image-macro memes, but memetic representations of women and people of color are fraught with negative stereotypes.
Some memes, such as Successful Black Man, are complex in their negative portrayals. This meme appears on the surface to dismantle stereotypes surrounding race, but a closer look reveals that it reasserts or even celebrates white privilege and social domination over African-Americans. It opens with a line of text that aligns African-Americans with violence, but defies this stereotype in the closing line. However, it also presents a narrow scope of “success” that is defined in terms of heterosexual marriage, procreation, moderate wealth, and whiteness. The term is framed to value the very social hierarchy that produces negative stereotypes against African-Americans and other marginalized identities by excluding any alternative forms of “success.” The meme highlights that Successful Black Man requires the adjective “successful” to be seen as such. The meme makes a joke out of the idea of an African-American man who fits the socially dominant ideal of what it means to be “successful.” The meme does not Successful Black Man as a social norm; he is the exception that proves the rule.
Two more image macro memes reinforce the stereotype of women as objects of male sexual fantasy: Good Girl Gina and Cool Chick Carol. Good Girl Gina features a stock photo of a young brunette woman who is often willing to perform sexual favors for her partner. Know Your Meme describes her as “an altruistic mate,” or a girlfriend who is as giving toward her boyfriend as he is to her. Far from “altruism,” the actions Good Girl Gina performs in the text captions almost always benefit the boyfriend. Cool Chick Carol is similar to Good Girl Gina. Sometimes she hangs out as one of the guys and wins burping contests, plays video games, or watches Star Wars, but usually she offers to perform sex acts for her boyfriend or friend with benefits—often while he plays video games or chats online—thus reducing her to a sex object.
On the other hand, many memes depict women as undesirable because they do not fit a male sexual fantasy. Overly Attached Girlfriend mocks a woman who, as the name suggests, is overly attached to her boyfriend. She is easily recognizable by her crazed stare, and she often reveals intense jealousy if her boyfriend interacts with other women. Overly Attached Girlfriend emphasizes and reiterates stereotypes that women are clingy and jealous or that they nag their significant others while vying for their attention. She is considered undesirable because her neediness is a threat to male independence.
Recently, Overly Attached Girlfriend has found a companion in Overly Attached Boyfriend, which features a young man with a manic expression similar to Overly Attached Girlfriend’s. He appears both on his own and PhotoShopped next to Overly Attached Girlfriend. Although Overly Attached Girlfriend has found a counterpart in Overly Attached Boyfriend, it is also worth noting that there are far more iterations of Overly Attached Girlfriend. Overly Attached Boyfriend doesn’t even have his own entry on Know Your Meme; instead he is a sub-entry of “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” This reinforces that the negative stereotypes behind Overly Attached Girlfriend and Overly Attached Boyfriend are largely attributed to women.
I said earlier that women and people of color receive the brunt of negative memetic portrayals, but, as Overly Attached Boyfriend shows, this was only partially true. White men can be the butt of memes if they display a culturally subpar version of masculinity. For instance, Overly Attached Boyfriend is remarkable because he is adopting characteristics of the stereotypical clingy female. Another meme, called Butthurt Dweller, depicts an overweight man with a ponytail, acne, and glasses and includes text expressing his assumed superiority. The meme plays on the term “basement dweller,” which is used in many corners of the Internet to denote an adult who lives at home with his/her parents and does not hold a job or contribute to society. Typically, “butthurt” refers to someone who responds overemotionally to something, but in the case of Butthurt Dweller the term means something more like “smug without the right to be.” Part of what makes the humor behind this meme is that it depicts a man whose appearance emanates a culturally subpar masculinity.
These are only a few examples of memes that marginalize. However, what becomes clear after this brief exploration of marginalizing memes is that we need to find a way to resist these negative representations in order to work on de-normalizing the stereotypes they represent. Through studying one particular meme, Fake Geek Girl or Idiot Nerd Girl, I have found counter-meming to be an effective method.
Counter-meming refers to taking a meme that already exists and changing its message. Mike Godwin defines it as “crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones” and Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear describe it as “the deliberate generation of a meme that aims at neutralizing or eradicating potentially harmful ideas.” In the case of an image macro meme, counter-meming can be as simple as finding the template for the meme and adding new text that affirms identities instead of challenging or denigrating them. This is what women who disagreed with the Fake Geek Girl meme did in 2012.
The female pictured in the Fake Geek Girl meme became its figurehead because she wears thick glasses and the original photo reveals she is wearing a cardigan, both staples of geek attire. However, with her perfectly styled hair, makeup, and traditionally attractive appearance, she represents mainstream “geek chic” more so than authentic geek attire. Notably, she has written “NERD” on her hand, which many geeks consider to be her greatest transgression; if she was really a nerd, she wouldn’t need or even want to advertise it.
The top text usually makes a general reference to geek or nerd culture, and the bottom text reveals the female’s ignorance or inexperience while implicitly claiming that the meme-creator and his/her ilk is well-versed in this esoteric element. The first image is also the first recorded instance of Fake Geek Girl; it shows that although she calls herself a “nerd” she is unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, one of the most popular video games of all time. The second image portrays her mixing up Star Trek and Star Wars, an absolute sin in geek culture. As you can see, Fake Geek Girl always gets it wrong, which highlights her fakeness. The meme reflects and in some contexts even amplifies some of the more misogynistic aspects of geek culture.
In 2012, geek girls decided they could no longer sit idly by and watch the Fake Geek Girl meme’s rise in popularity, so they remixed it to create a counter-meme and resist the stereotype. When most scholars and memers discuss meme remix, they mean changing it for survival—the objective is usually for it to last longer in the meme pool. However, the goal of remixing Fake Geek Girl was to kill it through satire. The remixes changed the messages so that they bolster geek girl identities instead of denigrating them. They satire not only the original meme, but also the notion that such a thing as a fake geek girl even exists.
The images you see here represent four different approaches to the Fake Geek Girl counter-meme. The first fights fire with fire by accusing geek guys of not possessing all of the knowledge they think geek girls should, thus questioning geek guy authenticity. The second criticizes the propagators of Fake Geek Girl for being so quick to point out common knowledge gaps for any newcomer. The third implies that the inclusion of girls into the geek community will not disrupt geek guy masculinity or somehow lessen their geekhood in any way. But one of the most effective images from this meme reclamation comes from the fourth one, which boldly asks, “Who are you to say she’s not?” This image defies the authority geek guys who challenge geek girls’ authenticity.
Unfortunately, the counter-meme’s influence was short-lived. Although it dominated Google Image, Quickmeme, and Meme Generator for the better part of two years, the original meme has re-gained momentum and re-asserted itself on all of these sites. Some of the more recent versions on Quickmeme have hundreds of thousands of shares on Facebook and Twitter. Although the Fake Geek Girl memes and counter-memes may have been relatively invisible in the grand scheme of things, they have become a vital part of conversations geared at lessening and eventually eliminating geek misogyny. Counter-memes will not change the world instantly, but their influence has the potential to ignite and re-open important discourses around key issues like gender, race, ethnicity, and other identity factors.
Now, what does this awareness of memes and stereotypes mean for the writing classroom? Allow me to answer with an example. The image on the left is Evil Kermit. This meme depicts Kermit the Frog facing another Kermit wearing a dark hood. The text illustrates the double-sidedness of personality, juxtaposing Kermit’s goodness with Evil Kermit’s evilness. For example, “Me: *accidentally drops ice in the kitchen* / Me to Me: kick it under the fridge.” This meme gained popularity a few months ago, and KitKat capitalized on it in January by remixing it into a Twitter advertisement.
This example reveals two things. First, memes are growing beyond their niche communities, infiltrating pop culture, and becoming important digital texts. Being able to create, remix, and counter memes could be valuable knowledge for students who will be expected to work extensively with digital texts once they graduate. Second, these memetic representations uncritically recapitulate identity antagonisms against African Americans. The “evil” aspect of Kermit is always hooded. When I showed this meme to an African American colleague, she pointed to the connection between Trayvon Martin and rap culture and the equation of a hoodie with an African American thug; she emphasized how this meme furthers the negative connotation between African Americans and gang life in a way that could cause KitKat to alienate African American customers.
As such, it seems imperative to equip students with the cultural and digital literacy to engage in memetic production while becoming critical of the content they create. In other words, not only do future digital and professional writers need to learn how to meme, but they also need to learn how to craft effective memes that do not perpetuate negative stereotypes against marginalized identities.
Works Cited
Godwin, Mike. (1994, October 1). Meme, Counter-Meme. Wired.
Good Girl Gina. (2012). Know Your Meme.
Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin. (2007). Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production. In M. Knobel & Colin Lankshear (eds.) A New Literacy Sampler (pp. 197-227). New York: Peter Lang.
Milner, Ryan. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2357- 2390.
Overly Attached Girlfriend. (2012). Know Your Meme.
Shifman, Limor. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vie, Stephanie. (2014). In Defense of ‘Slacktivism’: The Human Rights Campaign Facebook Logo As Digital Activism. First Monday, 19(4).
Conference on College Composition and Communication
March 17, 2017
Meming/Counter-Meming: Remixing Negative Memes to Deconstruct Stereotypes
My research broadly studies the intersections of gender and sexual identity and digital communication. My dissertation, Memes and 4chan and Haters, Oh My! Rhetoric, Identity, and Online Aggression, takes a rhetorical approach to studying online aggression. Frequently, targets of aggression are told not to “feed the trolls,” or not to respond to aggressive content lest they fuel further aggressive acts. However, this tactic does not work. First, it blames targets for further aggressive acts, not the aggressors; second, trolls and other online aggressors have set up a game that is impossible to win because no matter how you respond (or don’t) you are giving them what they want. If you ignore trolls, they have successfully silenced you. If you respond, you give them the reaction they need to escalate the situation. The trolls always get the last word. My research examines methods for responding to and resisting online aggression without amplifying it.
Today I am presenting material from my first chapter, “Meming and Counter-Meming: Remixing Digital Media to Challenge Gender Stereotypes.” This chapter examines how certain image macro memes use stereotypes to reinforce negative identity representations, and explores counter-meming as a method for resistance. Today I will talk about memes’ tendency to exploit stereotypes to gain a cheap laugh, then I will explore counter-meming as a method of resistance. I end by turning toward the writing classroom, illustrating why teaching our students to meme is becoming increasingly important, especially for those who intend to pursue careers in digital and professional writing.
Memes are images, videos, and other kinds of digital media that spread online. Image macros are specific kinds of memes that include an image—usually of a person or animal—with text superimposed on the top and bottom, often with the goal of making a joke. What began as a medium designed to propagate jokes online has evolved into a powerful form of public writing. Ryan Milner’s study of Occupy Wall Street memes looks at how users on all sides of the movement engaged with it through memes. He argues that they lead to polyvocality in the public sphere because they act as a “common language” with which people can have discussions on a global scale. Similarly, Stephanie Vie’s study of the Human Rights Campaign logo as digital activism on Facebook shows that memes provide a voice to the public. Milner and Vie both illustrate that much of the power memes hold stems from their universality: public audiences can consume and remix them uncritically and unreflectively.
Limor Shifman also acknowledges that memes can provide a platform for public expression, but she cautions that they can also continue traditions of silencing marginalized voices. She argues that if memes engage in damaging cultural assumptions, they can be dangerous because they perpetuate negative stereotypes. Alas, although memes have the power to exercise positive social influence, not all memes harness this power for good: many hinge on stereotypes to gain a cheap laugh and marginalize identities. When an image macro depicts a human instead of an animal, it often serves to propagate negative identity representations. Any identity can be the subject of image-macro memes, but memetic representations of women and people of color are fraught with negative stereotypes.
Some memes, such as Successful Black Man, are complex in their negative portrayals. This meme appears on the surface to dismantle stereotypes surrounding race, but a closer look reveals that it reasserts or even celebrates white privilege and social domination over African-Americans. It opens with a line of text that aligns African-Americans with violence, but defies this stereotype in the closing line. However, it also presents a narrow scope of “success” that is defined in terms of heterosexual marriage, procreation, moderate wealth, and whiteness. The term is framed to value the very social hierarchy that produces negative stereotypes against African-Americans and other marginalized identities by excluding any alternative forms of “success.” The meme highlights that Successful Black Man requires the adjective “successful” to be seen as such. The meme makes a joke out of the idea of an African-American man who fits the socially dominant ideal of what it means to be “successful.” The meme does not Successful Black Man as a social norm; he is the exception that proves the rule.
Two more image macro memes reinforce the stereotype of women as objects of male sexual fantasy: Good Girl Gina and Cool Chick Carol. Good Girl Gina features a stock photo of a young brunette woman who is often willing to perform sexual favors for her partner. Know Your Meme describes her as “an altruistic mate,” or a girlfriend who is as giving toward her boyfriend as he is to her. Far from “altruism,” the actions Good Girl Gina performs in the text captions almost always benefit the boyfriend. Cool Chick Carol is similar to Good Girl Gina. Sometimes she hangs out as one of the guys and wins burping contests, plays video games, or watches Star Wars, but usually she offers to perform sex acts for her boyfriend or friend with benefits—often while he plays video games or chats online—thus reducing her to a sex object.
On the other hand, many memes depict women as undesirable because they do not fit a male sexual fantasy. Overly Attached Girlfriend mocks a woman who, as the name suggests, is overly attached to her boyfriend. She is easily recognizable by her crazed stare, and she often reveals intense jealousy if her boyfriend interacts with other women. Overly Attached Girlfriend emphasizes and reiterates stereotypes that women are clingy and jealous or that they nag their significant others while vying for their attention. She is considered undesirable because her neediness is a threat to male independence.
Recently, Overly Attached Girlfriend has found a companion in Overly Attached Boyfriend, which features a young man with a manic expression similar to Overly Attached Girlfriend’s. He appears both on his own and PhotoShopped next to Overly Attached Girlfriend. Although Overly Attached Girlfriend has found a counterpart in Overly Attached Boyfriend, it is also worth noting that there are far more iterations of Overly Attached Girlfriend. Overly Attached Boyfriend doesn’t even have his own entry on Know Your Meme; instead he is a sub-entry of “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” This reinforces that the negative stereotypes behind Overly Attached Girlfriend and Overly Attached Boyfriend are largely attributed to women.
I said earlier that women and people of color receive the brunt of negative memetic portrayals, but, as Overly Attached Boyfriend shows, this was only partially true. White men can be the butt of memes if they display a culturally subpar version of masculinity. For instance, Overly Attached Boyfriend is remarkable because he is adopting characteristics of the stereotypical clingy female. Another meme, called Butthurt Dweller, depicts an overweight man with a ponytail, acne, and glasses and includes text expressing his assumed superiority. The meme plays on the term “basement dweller,” which is used in many corners of the Internet to denote an adult who lives at home with his/her parents and does not hold a job or contribute to society. Typically, “butthurt” refers to someone who responds overemotionally to something, but in the case of Butthurt Dweller the term means something more like “smug without the right to be.” Part of what makes the humor behind this meme is that it depicts a man whose appearance emanates a culturally subpar masculinity.
These are only a few examples of memes that marginalize. However, what becomes clear after this brief exploration of marginalizing memes is that we need to find a way to resist these negative representations in order to work on de-normalizing the stereotypes they represent. Through studying one particular meme, Fake Geek Girl or Idiot Nerd Girl, I have found counter-meming to be an effective method.
Counter-meming refers to taking a meme that already exists and changing its message. Mike Godwin defines it as “crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones” and Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear describe it as “the deliberate generation of a meme that aims at neutralizing or eradicating potentially harmful ideas.” In the case of an image macro meme, counter-meming can be as simple as finding the template for the meme and adding new text that affirms identities instead of challenging or denigrating them. This is what women who disagreed with the Fake Geek Girl meme did in 2012.
The female pictured in the Fake Geek Girl meme became its figurehead because she wears thick glasses and the original photo reveals she is wearing a cardigan, both staples of geek attire. However, with her perfectly styled hair, makeup, and traditionally attractive appearance, she represents mainstream “geek chic” more so than authentic geek attire. Notably, she has written “NERD” on her hand, which many geeks consider to be her greatest transgression; if she was really a nerd, she wouldn’t need or even want to advertise it.
The top text usually makes a general reference to geek or nerd culture, and the bottom text reveals the female’s ignorance or inexperience while implicitly claiming that the meme-creator and his/her ilk is well-versed in this esoteric element. The first image is also the first recorded instance of Fake Geek Girl; it shows that although she calls herself a “nerd” she is unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, one of the most popular video games of all time. The second image portrays her mixing up Star Trek and Star Wars, an absolute sin in geek culture. As you can see, Fake Geek Girl always gets it wrong, which highlights her fakeness. The meme reflects and in some contexts even amplifies some of the more misogynistic aspects of geek culture.
In 2012, geek girls decided they could no longer sit idly by and watch the Fake Geek Girl meme’s rise in popularity, so they remixed it to create a counter-meme and resist the stereotype. When most scholars and memers discuss meme remix, they mean changing it for survival—the objective is usually for it to last longer in the meme pool. However, the goal of remixing Fake Geek Girl was to kill it through satire. The remixes changed the messages so that they bolster geek girl identities instead of denigrating them. They satire not only the original meme, but also the notion that such a thing as a fake geek girl even exists.
The images you see here represent four different approaches to the Fake Geek Girl counter-meme. The first fights fire with fire by accusing geek guys of not possessing all of the knowledge they think geek girls should, thus questioning geek guy authenticity. The second criticizes the propagators of Fake Geek Girl for being so quick to point out common knowledge gaps for any newcomer. The third implies that the inclusion of girls into the geek community will not disrupt geek guy masculinity or somehow lessen their geekhood in any way. But one of the most effective images from this meme reclamation comes from the fourth one, which boldly asks, “Who are you to say she’s not?” This image defies the authority geek guys who challenge geek girls’ authenticity.
Unfortunately, the counter-meme’s influence was short-lived. Although it dominated Google Image, Quickmeme, and Meme Generator for the better part of two years, the original meme has re-gained momentum and re-asserted itself on all of these sites. Some of the more recent versions on Quickmeme have hundreds of thousands of shares on Facebook and Twitter. Although the Fake Geek Girl memes and counter-memes may have been relatively invisible in the grand scheme of things, they have become a vital part of conversations geared at lessening and eventually eliminating geek misogyny. Counter-memes will not change the world instantly, but their influence has the potential to ignite and re-open important discourses around key issues like gender, race, ethnicity, and other identity factors.
Now, what does this awareness of memes and stereotypes mean for the writing classroom? Allow me to answer with an example. The image on the left is Evil Kermit. This meme depicts Kermit the Frog facing another Kermit wearing a dark hood. The text illustrates the double-sidedness of personality, juxtaposing Kermit’s goodness with Evil Kermit’s evilness. For example, “Me: *accidentally drops ice in the kitchen* / Me to Me: kick it under the fridge.” This meme gained popularity a few months ago, and KitKat capitalized on it in January by remixing it into a Twitter advertisement.
This example reveals two things. First, memes are growing beyond their niche communities, infiltrating pop culture, and becoming important digital texts. Being able to create, remix, and counter memes could be valuable knowledge for students who will be expected to work extensively with digital texts once they graduate. Second, these memetic representations uncritically recapitulate identity antagonisms against African Americans. The “evil” aspect of Kermit is always hooded. When I showed this meme to an African American colleague, she pointed to the connection between Trayvon Martin and rap culture and the equation of a hoodie with an African American thug; she emphasized how this meme furthers the negative connotation between African Americans and gang life in a way that could cause KitKat to alienate African American customers.
As such, it seems imperative to equip students with the cultural and digital literacy to engage in memetic production while becoming critical of the content they create. In other words, not only do future digital and professional writers need to learn how to meme, but they also need to learn how to craft effective memes that do not perpetuate negative stereotypes against marginalized identities.
Works Cited
Godwin, Mike. (1994, October 1). Meme, Counter-Meme. Wired.
Good Girl Gina. (2012). Know Your Meme.
Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin. (2007). Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production. In M. Knobel & Colin Lankshear (eds.) A New Literacy Sampler (pp. 197-227). New York: Peter Lang.
Milner, Ryan. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2357- 2390.
Overly Attached Girlfriend. (2012). Know Your Meme.
Shifman, Limor. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vie, Stephanie. (2014). In Defense of ‘Slacktivism’: The Human Rights Campaign Facebook Logo As Digital Activism. First Monday, 19(4).