The Art of Memes in Feminist Digital Culture

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.