STEREOTYPING GENDER AND SEXISM THROUGH MEMES ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A SOCIO-COGNITIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
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Abstract
People on social media create memes as a strategy to communicate significant messages: such messages embed multifarious covert and overt meanings and consequently impact user’s understanding of the self and world. The present study aims to investigate the memes on social media regarding the role of husbands and wives in a patriarchal marriage. This is a qualitative study which employs Van Dijik’s Socio-cognitive approach for the critical discourse analysis of the matrimonial memes on social media. For this purpose, ten memes have been selected by employing purposive sampling from popular Facebook pages. The research design is based on the notion that such memes serve as a tool to inform about polarization between husbands and wives and determine the boundaries in terms of their roles and responsibilities in a particular social setting. The construction of this polarization and power structures are made natural on social media by repetitive use of context models and mental models that popularize past social cognition of the role of women and men in marriage. Moreover, it also goes parallel to the concept of dynamicity and fluidity of the construction of identity (ies) in the Reconceptualised Model of Multiple Identities (Jones, McEwen and Abes: 2007) which provides insight into how these external factors including social norms and practices, stereotyping, sociopolitical status influence people’s perception of self particularly regarding gender roles in the social institutions such as marriage in this particular research. The data have been analyzed by making three categories based on the discursive, cognitive and social components. The findings reveal that the socio-cognitive representation of wives’ in such jokes are as domineering, quarrelsome, inefficient, and shopping lovers and husbands’ are portrayed as oppressed, lazy and useless. Such ideological assumptions are encouraged, supported and propagated on social media through such content which definitely has strong influence on social cognition of society regarding patriarchal power structures.
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