Internet Memes and Hegemonic Masculinity: Constructions of Vernacular Authority on Anti-feminist Social Media
Andrew Peck, Miami University, Oxford

In this presentation, I argue that the fluid nature of networked communication facilitates the existence of ongoing, competing assertions of vernacular authority. Internet memes are especially attuned to circulating these multiple authorities due to their highly spreadable and customizable nature. Networks make it increasingly commonplace for competing notions of vernacular authority to not only develop but also to collide. In these moments of collision, when expectations for vernacular practice and authority are breached, users respond to the vernacular with the vernacular. 

This presentation looks at how one pro-feminist meme ("Who Needs Feminism”) was appropriated by anti-feminist social media. Through acts of memetic creation, circulation, manipulation, and appropriation, these anti-feminist users responded to a perceived threat to their hegemonic masculinity by redeploying memetic practice to reassert their own vernacular authority, speech, and identity. This presentation engages with the social, aesthetic, and technological factors that enabled these acts of appropriation while also considering the challenges of dealing with deceit, image manipulation, and trolling in digital ethnographic research.