Week 2

Week 2- Gender & Memes

In continuing with last week's established theme of the irrational, crazy woman, I wanted to find the backgrounds of these two well-known, woman-centered memes, "Big Red," (left) and "Overly-Attached Girlfriend" (right). Big Red is typically remixed as an ultra-feminist, misandrist meme regarding how anything that even has the letters "men" in it triggers her into an angry tirade. She is a photo of Chanty Binx, taken from a video posted to YouTube of her confronting a men's rights protestor in Canada with her stance on feminism. In April of 2013, a video of her yelling to these protestors while reading off of a sheet of paper with responses was posted highlighting the event at the University of Toronto, and the meme began from there.

The overly-attached girlfriend meme is considered an offshoot of the advice animals memes we examined in class this week. The photo stems from a YouTube video submission to Justin Bieber's online sing-off contest where the singer, Laina Morris, parodies his song "boyfriend" to her clingy, fun lyrics of "girlfriend." Less than one day later, a Reddit link was posted to Laina's video and the meme began circulation.

Both of these memes and their remixes and variants build upon the themes presented in the videos. Feminism has been culturally re-appropriated in previous years to equate the term with man-hating. Chanty was in a public space arguing feminism with a group of men's rights protestors, so Chanty was immediately turned into a misandrist in meme form. Similarly, Laina's video on a funny, clingy-girlfriend turned into her being the extreme, possibly mentally-unstable girlfriend. In studying these memes, it's important to examine the context from which they originated to see what themes are present in the original photo or picture, and how they are possibly appropriated and amplified in a male-dominated culture. One can be argued as innocent and fun while the other tends to demean a cultural group, but they both signify a cultural elevation of one gender while negating the importance or mental stability of another.

In taking the time to find the original meme from which remixes and parodies are born, we can fully understand how memes are considered "interconnected content units which share common characteristics," (Shiffman, 2014, p. 53). They may be shared and remixed in certain ways, but there is always the characteristic of theme and the form of the same content, form, and stance (Shiffman, 2014).