Critical Queer Feminist Autoethnography: A METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING MEMES
Derek M. Sparby, Illinois State University
Presented at Computers and Writing, June 21, 2024
Presented at Computers and Writing, June 21, 2024
Hi everyone, I’m Derek Sparby, Associate Professor of Digital Rhetorics and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Before I get started, I just want to let you know that there is an access copy of this talk available on my website if you’d like to follow along there. You can scan this QR code or go to emsparb.com/cwcon24.
Memes spread across the internet quickly and are always on the move, often disappearing from one place and reappearing in another. It is difficult to keep track of where memes originate and spread, what memes are popular at a given moment, and which ones have fallen out of favor. At the same time, memes are entwined in our everyday digital cultural habitus, acting as powerful conduits of culture that have the power to help us express how we’re feeling and build community spaces (Lewis, 2012; Milner, 2013a, Sparby, 2017; Levesque DeCamp, 2022; Sparby, 2023); radicalize and influence politics and social movements (Milner, 2013b; Vie, 2014; DeCook, 2018; Mina, 2019; Woods and Hahner, 2019; Spencer, 2019; Condis, 2020; Williams, 2020; Sparby, 2022a); and cause digital harm through appropriation and antagonism, or respond to and resist it (Milner, 2013c; Miltner, 2014; Scott, 2014; Phillips, 2015; Jackson, 2017; Jackson, 2019; Sparby, 2023). Given their ephemerality but also their embeddedness in our sociocultural habitus, how can we research memes effectively?
In this presentation, I draw from my own extensive background a meme creator, (re)circulator, and researcher to continue refining a critical queer feminist autoethnographic methodology for studying memes, which I began unpacking in my book Memetic Rhetorics (2023). Studying memes with this framework empowers researchers to attend to issues of power and gender through memetic representations while also acknowledging that any memetic research is deeply intertwined with the researcher. Let’s start by breaking down each aspect of the framework.
Critical. This feels like a word that we use in digital rhetorics and TPC a lot, but don’t always define, except maybe recently as discussions of critical race theory have hit the mainstream. Simply put, a critical approach attends to power relationships when conducting research, often with the goal of exposing power imbalances in hopes of destabilizing or overthrowing them. Bhavanani, Chua, and Collins (2014) concisely define “critical research” as research that “is firmly grounded within an understanding of social structures (social inequalities), power relationships (power inequalities), and the agency of human beings (an engagement with the fact that human beings actively think about their worlds).… [It] refers to issues of epistemology, power, micropolitics, and resistance” (p. 166). Importantly, critical research does not just point out disempowerment; it seeks to redress it. A critical approach opens possibilities to include intersectional frameworks, and it often includes reflection as a core component.
Queer. A critical approach also opens pathways to queer and feminist approaches; in fact, one could argue that an approach can’t be queer or feminist without being critical. Queer methodologies often focus on researching queer participants and spaces. Some think a researcher must identify as queer to adopt a queer methodology, but they don’t. Queer methodologies encompass a broader disposition to research that challenges traditional models.
Notably, as Dadas has noted (2016), queer methodologies are messy and acknowledge the messiness. She offers Glasby’s (2014) “rhetoric of negotiation” to balance tensions in the mess, “a way of working through competing ideas… without expecting the kind of neat resolution that often dominates academic discourse” (p. 62). Memes are also messy. To study memes is to revel in the mess; you can try to untangle various threads of memes, but you are unlikely to really truly unpack everything. For instance, say you want to trace a meme back to its origin. Unless you were there when it was made, or if Know Your Meme, the internet’s largest meme database, has a detailed entry on it, you may never be able to find the origin. And even if you do, memes are intertextual and often draw on other memes and cultural phenomena, so the origin of one particular meme may only be one part of the story. Researching memes means you must be flexible and get comfortable with this mess.
Feminist. Feminist approaches explicitly necessitate that gender be at the center of a research project. However, they do not require one to be a woman. And I say this because I still have students who identify as men and hesitate to use feminist methodologies because they feel like they may be coopting them. A key component of feminist research is collaboration (Schell, 2010); this can mean collaborating with other researchers, but it also often means collaborating with research participants. As I’ll explain in more detail when I talk about autoethnography, understanding a meme or a meme community requires a researcher to be a part of that community. But even then, not everything will be apparent.
When researching queer memes on TikTok, I was unsure of the origins of a memetic phrase that many TikTokers were using, so I posted a video asking for help finding information. At the time, my followers and I already had a reciprocal relationship, often liking and commenting on each other’s videos, so this video had some traction in that community and even a bit beyond. I received dozens of answers to my question and one TikToker even created a video response to elaborate; they also offered to meet with me on Zoom and talk more, which I accepted. But feminist collaboration doesn’t just stop there. It also requires permission and input from participants. I asked for permission to include quoted responses in my book (anyone who didn’t give it wasn’t quoted) and I also offered to let anyone who helped me read and comment on that chapter to ensure accuracy. No one took my up on this and said they trusted me instead. That trust is key: feminist methodologies that involve humans require a relationship of trust between researcher and participants.
Both queer and feminist approaches also hold at their cores a commitment to exposing and dismantling systems of oppression around gender and sexuality. One way of doing the latter is giving agency to or highlighting the agency of women and queer rhetors and rhetorical texts.
As such, when studying memes this can mean asking questions like
Autoethnography. Autoethnography uses ethnography to connect researcher experiences to wider sociocultural contexts. Unlike traditional ethnography, participant-observation or other similar methodologies, autoethnography requires insider knowledge from within the community under study. In the contexts of memes, this means that researcher positionality influences which meme communities we might be able to study ethically. As I have mentioned already, one must be a member of a meme community to even gain access to it, let alone to trace memetic strands and piece together multiple layers of meaning.
In Memetic Rhetorics (2023), I explained the early roots of my relationship to memes and meme culture and I also detailed my positionality as a meme creator, (re)circulator, and researcher. Following Faris (2019), I used my deeply personal connections with various memetic communities, artifacts, behaviors, and processes to inform the sites for analysis that I chose as well as the analyses themselves, many of which rely on the kinds of knowledges only long-term insiders would have access to.
However, autoethnography has the potential to be extractive, or to take from a community without permission or reciprocity, which is part of why I included a feminist approach to collaboration in my methodology. While I feel like I accomplished the first part (permission), I’m not sure I was as reciprocal as I could have been to all meme communities. Part of the queer messiness of that project was figuring out how to give back to the communities I studied, which I’m still working out. For the TikTokers who helped me, reciprocation looked like engaging with and promoting their content; since all of us were small content creators, this had a small impact, but it was still appreciated.
On the other hand, it’s crucial to recognize that not all autoethnographic research projects can engage in this reciprocity for various reasons. For some communities I studied, it was unclear what reciprocation could look like. I studied a meme community on Facebook that was archived and no longer accepting members or new posts, and I studied memetic events around the Fake Geek Girl meme that had long since transpired and the core community of which had dissolved or transformed. I was unable to reciprocate for other communities because they were communities of harm. When I researched 4chan (Sparby, 2017), I found it safer for myself to not alert that community to my research project, which also meant I was not able to form a reciprocal relationship to it. Using my insider knowledge of the community from my youth, I was able to recognize that it was a space worth studying, but also that it was one that I would not be able to engage with outside of my research. As such, I had to both balance my research needs with the community’s so that I wasn’t being extractive and also protect myself from potential harm (Sparby, 2022b).
An autoethnographic approach to studying memes can lead to some questions like
Taken together, these approaches make up a critical queer feminist autoethnographic methodology for studying memes, which is the approach that made Memetic Rhetorics possible. For the sake of time, I’ve only kind of scratched the surface of what each approach contributes to a methodology for studying memes. But overall, this methodology afforded me the ability to use my embeddedness in several meme communities and the larger meme culture to examine memes and meme events that others might not have had the same access to. It also let me highlight queer and feminist rhetorical ways of carving out space and speaking back against oppression through memes while positing ways for everyday users to meme more ethically with identity and privacy in mind.
However, this approach also has drawbacks. My positionality, which is one of this methodology’s greatest strengths, is also its greatest limitation. As a white person, I don’t have access to many memetic spaces created by and for people of color, nor should I since those spaces are not intended for me. An early review of my book proposal critiqued my project because it seemed so focused on white spaces, suggesting I look at Black Twitter for one of the chapters. After considering this review, I tried to incorporate Black Twitter into my project, but it soon became clear that any analysis I could provide would barely scratch the surface of the memetic context and could even misconstrue the rhetorics of that space. Instead, I opted to elevate Black scholars like Jackson (2014, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2019). And I highly recommend Brock (2020), whose work I unfortunately found too late to include in Memetic Rhetorics, for a discussion of Black Twitter. In addition, as someone who has been relatively sheltered in United States contexts and politics, I feel incapable of addressing international memes at any length, although I cited Mina (2019), whose book on global political memes extensively reveals how memes can subvert dominant political parties in China.
Because memes are so highly contextual and require such intimate cultural knowledge to fully understand, any research on Black or Indigenous or Asian or Latino/a or non-Western memes should be done by members of those communities or researchers who are deeply embedded within them. As you can see in this slide, I’m showing the covers I showed in the previous two slide, but I’ve also added Cindy Tekobbe’s Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces (2024) which will be out in August and promises to be crucial to discussion of social media and memes. Trying to do this work as a white scholar would be colonizing, harmful, and alienating to the communities under discussion.
In recognizing this limitation, I am editing a collection called Memes and Rhetorical Identity that foregrounds ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to memes and meme communities and that will include chapters on South Asian immigrant memes, neurodivergent meme communities, Black meme mixes, trans memes, and Armenian memetic humor in the face of war and trauma, to name only a few. The goal of this collection is to elevate voices from people in these communities who can tell their own meme stories from their own positionalities. (And I’m currently looking for a publisher, so if you have any suggestions…)
As rhetoric scholars continue to study memes and meme communities, it is crucial that we develop capacious methodologies for researching them that recognize the ways each has distinct sociocultural histories and threads. While a queer and feminist approach fit my research project, these could be swapped out for any number of other critical approaches like critical race theory or decolonial. But it’s my hope that future meme projects will be critical and seek to unbalance hegemonic discourses, and my assertion that they definitely need to be autoethnographic, or at least ethnographic with a deep understanding and a strong sense of ethics and care for the communities under study.
Thank you for listening! You can find my references at the end of the access copy on my website, which again you can find via this QR code and at emsparb.com/cwcon24. I look forward to any questions you may have
Memes spread across the internet quickly and are always on the move, often disappearing from one place and reappearing in another. It is difficult to keep track of where memes originate and spread, what memes are popular at a given moment, and which ones have fallen out of favor. At the same time, memes are entwined in our everyday digital cultural habitus, acting as powerful conduits of culture that have the power to help us express how we’re feeling and build community spaces (Lewis, 2012; Milner, 2013a, Sparby, 2017; Levesque DeCamp, 2022; Sparby, 2023); radicalize and influence politics and social movements (Milner, 2013b; Vie, 2014; DeCook, 2018; Mina, 2019; Woods and Hahner, 2019; Spencer, 2019; Condis, 2020; Williams, 2020; Sparby, 2022a); and cause digital harm through appropriation and antagonism, or respond to and resist it (Milner, 2013c; Miltner, 2014; Scott, 2014; Phillips, 2015; Jackson, 2017; Jackson, 2019; Sparby, 2023). Given their ephemerality but also their embeddedness in our sociocultural habitus, how can we research memes effectively?
In this presentation, I draw from my own extensive background a meme creator, (re)circulator, and researcher to continue refining a critical queer feminist autoethnographic methodology for studying memes, which I began unpacking in my book Memetic Rhetorics (2023). Studying memes with this framework empowers researchers to attend to issues of power and gender through memetic representations while also acknowledging that any memetic research is deeply intertwined with the researcher. Let’s start by breaking down each aspect of the framework.
Critical. This feels like a word that we use in digital rhetorics and TPC a lot, but don’t always define, except maybe recently as discussions of critical race theory have hit the mainstream. Simply put, a critical approach attends to power relationships when conducting research, often with the goal of exposing power imbalances in hopes of destabilizing or overthrowing them. Bhavanani, Chua, and Collins (2014) concisely define “critical research” as research that “is firmly grounded within an understanding of social structures (social inequalities), power relationships (power inequalities), and the agency of human beings (an engagement with the fact that human beings actively think about their worlds).… [It] refers to issues of epistemology, power, micropolitics, and resistance” (p. 166). Importantly, critical research does not just point out disempowerment; it seeks to redress it. A critical approach opens possibilities to include intersectional frameworks, and it often includes reflection as a core component.
- When studying memes, this means asking questions like
- Who made this meme and for whom?
- What does this meme reveal about who made it and the audience they made it for?
- What power dynamic relationships does it reveal about the maker to the audience, or about the maker and the audience?
- What would it take to dismantle oppressive power dynamics? What are viewers of the meme already doing to dismantle these oppressive power dynamics?
Queer. A critical approach also opens pathways to queer and feminist approaches; in fact, one could argue that an approach can’t be queer or feminist without being critical. Queer methodologies often focus on researching queer participants and spaces. Some think a researcher must identify as queer to adopt a queer methodology, but they don’t. Queer methodologies encompass a broader disposition to research that challenges traditional models.
Notably, as Dadas has noted (2016), queer methodologies are messy and acknowledge the messiness. She offers Glasby’s (2014) “rhetoric of negotiation” to balance tensions in the mess, “a way of working through competing ideas… without expecting the kind of neat resolution that often dominates academic discourse” (p. 62). Memes are also messy. To study memes is to revel in the mess; you can try to untangle various threads of memes, but you are unlikely to really truly unpack everything. For instance, say you want to trace a meme back to its origin. Unless you were there when it was made, or if Know Your Meme, the internet’s largest meme database, has a detailed entry on it, you may never be able to find the origin. And even if you do, memes are intertextual and often draw on other memes and cultural phenomena, so the origin of one particular meme may only be one part of the story. Researching memes means you must be flexible and get comfortable with this mess.
Feminist. Feminist approaches explicitly necessitate that gender be at the center of a research project. However, they do not require one to be a woman. And I say this because I still have students who identify as men and hesitate to use feminist methodologies because they feel like they may be coopting them. A key component of feminist research is collaboration (Schell, 2010); this can mean collaborating with other researchers, but it also often means collaborating with research participants. As I’ll explain in more detail when I talk about autoethnography, understanding a meme or a meme community requires a researcher to be a part of that community. But even then, not everything will be apparent.
When researching queer memes on TikTok, I was unsure of the origins of a memetic phrase that many TikTokers were using, so I posted a video asking for help finding information. At the time, my followers and I already had a reciprocal relationship, often liking and commenting on each other’s videos, so this video had some traction in that community and even a bit beyond. I received dozens of answers to my question and one TikToker even created a video response to elaborate; they also offered to meet with me on Zoom and talk more, which I accepted. But feminist collaboration doesn’t just stop there. It also requires permission and input from participants. I asked for permission to include quoted responses in my book (anyone who didn’t give it wasn’t quoted) and I also offered to let anyone who helped me read and comment on that chapter to ensure accuracy. No one took my up on this and said they trusted me instead. That trust is key: feminist methodologies that involve humans require a relationship of trust between researcher and participants.
Both queer and feminist approaches also hold at their cores a commitment to exposing and dismantling systems of oppression around gender and sexuality. One way of doing the latter is giving agency to or highlighting the agency of women and queer rhetors and rhetorical texts.
As such, when studying memes this can mean asking questions like
- Whose stories and experiences are often left out of meme research and mainstream meme discourse?
- What do those stories and experiences look like? What do those communities’ memes look like?
- What does it mean to elevate memes from these communities?
- How does highlighting them deepen our understanding of rhetoric and digital communication?
Autoethnography. Autoethnography uses ethnography to connect researcher experiences to wider sociocultural contexts. Unlike traditional ethnography, participant-observation or other similar methodologies, autoethnography requires insider knowledge from within the community under study. In the contexts of memes, this means that researcher positionality influences which meme communities we might be able to study ethically. As I have mentioned already, one must be a member of a meme community to even gain access to it, let alone to trace memetic strands and piece together multiple layers of meaning.
In Memetic Rhetorics (2023), I explained the early roots of my relationship to memes and meme culture and I also detailed my positionality as a meme creator, (re)circulator, and researcher. Following Faris (2019), I used my deeply personal connections with various memetic communities, artifacts, behaviors, and processes to inform the sites for analysis that I chose as well as the analyses themselves, many of which rely on the kinds of knowledges only long-term insiders would have access to.
However, autoethnography has the potential to be extractive, or to take from a community without permission or reciprocity, which is part of why I included a feminist approach to collaboration in my methodology. While I feel like I accomplished the first part (permission), I’m not sure I was as reciprocal as I could have been to all meme communities. Part of the queer messiness of that project was figuring out how to give back to the communities I studied, which I’m still working out. For the TikTokers who helped me, reciprocation looked like engaging with and promoting their content; since all of us were small content creators, this had a small impact, but it was still appreciated.
On the other hand, it’s crucial to recognize that not all autoethnographic research projects can engage in this reciprocity for various reasons. For some communities I studied, it was unclear what reciprocation could look like. I studied a meme community on Facebook that was archived and no longer accepting members or new posts, and I studied memetic events around the Fake Geek Girl meme that had long since transpired and the core community of which had dissolved or transformed. I was unable to reciprocate for other communities because they were communities of harm. When I researched 4chan (Sparby, 2017), I found it safer for myself to not alert that community to my research project, which also meant I was not able to form a reciprocal relationship to it. Using my insider knowledge of the community from my youth, I was able to recognize that it was a space worth studying, but also that it was one that I would not be able to engage with outside of my research. As such, I had to both balance my research needs with the community’s so that I wasn’t being extractive and also protect myself from potential harm (Sparby, 2022b).
An autoethnographic approach to studying memes can lead to some questions like
- What meme communities does my positionality give me access to?
- What kinds of rhetorics do these communities use that others might not have access to?
- How can I non-extractively research these communities?
- How can I give back to these communities while/after researching them?
- Are these communities safe to give back to and/or engage with outside of the research project?
Taken together, these approaches make up a critical queer feminist autoethnographic methodology for studying memes, which is the approach that made Memetic Rhetorics possible. For the sake of time, I’ve only kind of scratched the surface of what each approach contributes to a methodology for studying memes. But overall, this methodology afforded me the ability to use my embeddedness in several meme communities and the larger meme culture to examine memes and meme events that others might not have had the same access to. It also let me highlight queer and feminist rhetorical ways of carving out space and speaking back against oppression through memes while positing ways for everyday users to meme more ethically with identity and privacy in mind.
However, this approach also has drawbacks. My positionality, which is one of this methodology’s greatest strengths, is also its greatest limitation. As a white person, I don’t have access to many memetic spaces created by and for people of color, nor should I since those spaces are not intended for me. An early review of my book proposal critiqued my project because it seemed so focused on white spaces, suggesting I look at Black Twitter for one of the chapters. After considering this review, I tried to incorporate Black Twitter into my project, but it soon became clear that any analysis I could provide would barely scratch the surface of the memetic context and could even misconstrue the rhetorics of that space. Instead, I opted to elevate Black scholars like Jackson (2014, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2019). And I highly recommend Brock (2020), whose work I unfortunately found too late to include in Memetic Rhetorics, for a discussion of Black Twitter. In addition, as someone who has been relatively sheltered in United States contexts and politics, I feel incapable of addressing international memes at any length, although I cited Mina (2019), whose book on global political memes extensively reveals how memes can subvert dominant political parties in China.
Because memes are so highly contextual and require such intimate cultural knowledge to fully understand, any research on Black or Indigenous or Asian or Latino/a or non-Western memes should be done by members of those communities or researchers who are deeply embedded within them. As you can see in this slide, I’m showing the covers I showed in the previous two slide, but I’ve also added Cindy Tekobbe’s Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces (2024) which will be out in August and promises to be crucial to discussion of social media and memes. Trying to do this work as a white scholar would be colonizing, harmful, and alienating to the communities under discussion.
In recognizing this limitation, I am editing a collection called Memes and Rhetorical Identity that foregrounds ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to memes and meme communities and that will include chapters on South Asian immigrant memes, neurodivergent meme communities, Black meme mixes, trans memes, and Armenian memetic humor in the face of war and trauma, to name only a few. The goal of this collection is to elevate voices from people in these communities who can tell their own meme stories from their own positionalities. (And I’m currently looking for a publisher, so if you have any suggestions…)
As rhetoric scholars continue to study memes and meme communities, it is crucial that we develop capacious methodologies for researching them that recognize the ways each has distinct sociocultural histories and threads. While a queer and feminist approach fit my research project, these could be swapped out for any number of other critical approaches like critical race theory or decolonial. But it’s my hope that future meme projects will be critical and seek to unbalance hegemonic discourses, and my assertion that they definitely need to be autoethnographic, or at least ethnographic with a deep understanding and a strong sense of ethics and care for the communities under study.
Thank you for listening! You can find my references at the end of the access copy on my website, which again you can find via this QR code and at emsparb.com/cwcon24. I look forward to any questions you may have