The Political Punctum: Resonance, Standpoint Theory, and the #YesAllWomen Meme

• In Event: Valuing Entertainment

Abstract

As pieces of popular commentary, memes permeate the participatory media landscape. They pepper forum threads, fill YouTube playlists, and enliven Twitter hashtags. Populist, affective, and entertaining, memes serve many purposes for many people. Using Barthes’ conception of the punctum (1981), Sandra Harding’s articulation of feminist standpoint theory (1993), and Stuart Hall’s account of encoding and decoding (1973), this presentation argues that people encode themselves--their race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability--into the memes they engage. This process affords political significance to memetic creation, circulation, and transformation. To illustrate, we examine the #YesAllWomen meme popular in 2013. In response to a misogyny-fueled shooting in Santa Barbara, tens of thousands of women across the globe used the Twitter hashtag to catalog the antagonisms they regularly face. In the case of #YesAllWomen—and examples beyond—media participants memetically encode personal experience into entertaining content. There’s political power in this participatory process.


Ryan M. Milner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, USA. He is a leading scholar on internet memes, having been published in The Fibreculture Journal and the International Journal of Communication, and contributed public commentary to The Conversation and The New York Times.

Whitney Phillips holds a Ph.D. in English (Digital Culture focus/Folklore structured emphasis) from the University of Oregon and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She has published essays and articles on internet memes, constitutive online humor, so-bad-it's-good media engagement, free speech online, and online vigilantism. Her research has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals First Monday, Television and New Media, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

Authors

• Ryan M. Milner, College of Charleston

• Whitney Phillips, U of Oregon