Element contents
Memes, History and Emotional Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2023
Summary
Internet memes are recognised for their role in creating community through shared humour or in-group cultural knowledge. One category of meme uses historical art pieces, coupled with short texts or dialogue, as a form of social commentary on both past and present. These memes often rely on a (mis)reading of the emotions of those represented in such artwork for humorous purposes. As such, they provide an important example of transhistorical engagement between contemporary society and past artifacts centred on the nature of emotion. This Element explores the historical art meme as a key cultural form that offers insight into contemporary online emotional cultures and the ways that historical emotions enable and inform the practices of such culture. It particularly attends to humour as a mode which helps to mediate the disjuncture between past and present emotion and which enables historical emotion to 'do' political and community-building work amongst meme users.
Keywords
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009063715Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 13 July 2023
References
Adams, A. J. (2009). Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community, Santa Barbara: University of California.Google Scholar
Aharoni, T. (2019). When high and pop culture (re)mix: An inquiry into the memetic transformations of artwork. New Media & Society, 21(10), 2283–304.Google Scholar
Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Akram, U., Ellis, J. G., Glhenda Cau, Frayer Hershaw, Ashlieen Rajenthran, Mollie Lowe, Carissa Trommelen & Jennifer Drabble (2021). Eye tracking and attentional bias for depressive internet memes in depression. Experimental Brain Research, 239(2), 575–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Al-Natour, R. (2020). The digital racist fellowship behind the anti-aboriginal internet memes. Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 780–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bai, Q. Qi Dan, Zhe Mu, and Maokun Yang (2019). A systematic review of emoji: Current research and future perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(2221). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02221.Google Scholar
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barclay, K. (2021). Taking Bonnie Prince Charlie to heart: Children, emotion and rebellion. Parergon, 38(2), 157–85.Google Scholar
Barclay, K. (2020). The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barclay, K. (2019a). Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland, 1800–1845, Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Barclay, K. (2019b). Falling in love with the dead. Rethinking History, 22(4), 459–73.Google Scholar
Barclay, K. (2017). New materialism and the new history of the emotions. Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 1(1), 161–83.Google Scholar
Barclay, K., Crozier-De Rosa, S., & Stearns, P., eds. (2020). Sources for the History of Emotions: A Student Guide, London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, D. G. (2017). Emotional debris in early modern letters. In Downes, S., Holloway, S. & Randles, S., eds., Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 114–32.Google Scholar
Beer, D. (2013). Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation, London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, L. (2008). Thinking about feeling historical. Emotion, Space and Society, 1(1), 4–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Breheny, C. (2017). ‘By any memes necessary’: Exploring the intersectional politics of feminist memes on Instagram (Masters thesis, Uppsala University).Google Scholar
Bremmer, J. N., & Roodenburg, H. (1997). A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bristow, D., & Bown, A. (2019). Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Santa Barbara: Punctum Books.Google Scholar
Chagas, V., Freire, F., Rios, D., & Magalhães, D. (2019). Political memes and the politics of memes: A methodological proposal for content analysis of online political memes. First Monday, 24(2), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i2.7264.Google Scholar
Cheauré, E., & Nohejl, R. (2014). Humour and Laughter in History: Transcultural Perspectives, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Google Scholar
Chonka, P. (2019). The empire tweets back? #HumanitarianStarWars and memetic self-critique in the aid industry. Social Media + Society, 5(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119888655.Google Scholar
Cover, R. (2015). Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self, London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
D’Arcens, L. (2018). ‘In remembrance of his persone’: Transhistorical empathy and the Chaucerian face. In McKendry, A., Raine, M. & Hickey, H., eds., Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 201–17.Google Scholar
D’Arcens, L. (2014). Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.Google Scholar
D’Arcens, L. (2011). Laughing in the face of the past: Satire and nostalgia in medieval heritage tourism. Postmedieval, 2, 155–70.Google Scholar
D’Arcens, L., & Lynch, A. (2018). Feeling for the premodern. Exemplaria, 30(3), 183–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davison, P. (2012). The language of internet memes, In Mandiberg, M., ed., The Social Media Reader, New York: New York University Press, pp. 120–34.Google Scholar
DeCook, J. R. (2018). Memes and symbolic violence: #Proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(4), 485–504.Google Scholar
de Groot, J. (2016). Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Groot, J. (2006). Empathy and enfranchisement: Popular histories. Rethinking History, 10(3), 391–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Dell, H. (2018). What to do with nostalgia in medieval and medievalism studies? Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2(2), 274–91.Google Scholar
Department of History, Florida State University (20 May 2020). Meme Tuesday … Facebook page, www.facebook.com/139850989436/photos/meme-tuesday-when-you-realize-your-zoom-session-started-20-min-ago-meme-credit-l/10158308585264437/.Google Scholar
Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I., eds. (2012). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, N. (2014). It’s supposed to look like shit: The internet ugly aesthetic. Journal of Visual Culture, 13(3), 314–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Downes, S., & Trigg, S. (2017). Facing up to the history of emotions. Postmedieval, 8, 3–11.Google Scholar
Eagleton, T. (1981). Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso Editions.Google Scholar
Ehrhart, M. J. (1999). Machaut’s allegorical narratives and the Roman de la Rose. Reading Medieval Studies, XXV, 33–58.Google Scholar
Ellis, D., & Tucker, I. (2020). Emotion in the Digital Age: Technologies, Data and Psychosocial Life, London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flecha Ortiz, J. A., Santos Corrada, M. A., Lopez, E., & Dones, V. (2020). Analysis of the use of memes as an exponent of collective coping during COVID-19 in Puerto Rico. Media International Australia, 178(1), 168–81.Google Scholar
Frosh, P., & Pinchevski, A. (2014). Media witnessing and the ripeness of time. Cultural Studies, 28(4), 594–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frevert, U. (2011). Emotions in History – Lost and Found, Budapest: Central European University Press.Google Scholar
Gal, N., Shifman, L., & Kampf, Z. (2016). ‘It gets better’: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society, 18(8), 1698–714.Google Scholar
Gerbi, L. (2022). Romantic and socio-sexual scripts in eighteenth-century Britain (MPhil thesis, University of Adelaide).Google Scholar
Gerzic, M., & Norrie, A., eds. (2018). From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past, London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, D. (2005). Marriage calculations in the eighteenth century: Deconstructing the love vs. duty binary. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 33, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0033.009.Google Scholar
Grigore, G., & Molesworth, M. (2018), ‘Pouring politics down our throats’: Political CSR communication and consumer catharsis. In Crowther, D. & Seifi, S., eds., Redefining Corporate Social Responsibility, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 71–86.Google Scholar
Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. (2013). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. J. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.Google Scholar
Harlow, S., Rowlett, J. T., & Huse, L.-K. (2020). ‘Kim Davis be like … ’: A feminist critique of gender humor in online political memes. Information, Communication & Society, 23(7), 1057–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, R. L., & Allen, K. (2021). ‘Smash the patriarchy’: The changing meanings and work of ‘patriarchy’ online. Feminist Theory, 22(2), 165–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, A. (2012a). The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, A. (2012b). The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us, New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Hotchin, J. (2017). Emotions and the ritual of a nun’s coronation in late medieval Germany. In Bailey, M. L. & Barclay, K., eds., Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 171–92.Google Scholar
Ignatow, G., & Robinson, L. (2017). Pierre Bourdieu: Theorizing the digital. Information, Communication & Society, 20(7), 950–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isaac, M. (2021). Reddit is valued at more that $10 billion in latest funding round. The New York Times, 12 August. www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/technology/reddit-new-funding.html.Google Scholar
Jane, E. (2017). ‘Dude … stop the spread’: Antagonism, agonism and #manspreading on social media. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(5), 459–75.Google Scholar
Jenkins, H., Ito, M., & boyd, D.(2015). Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics, Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Jones, C. (2014). The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kendon, L. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kessel, M., & Merziger, P. (2012). The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2014). Studying new literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(2), 97–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koslofsky, C. (2014). Knowing skin in early modern Europe, c. 1450–1750. History Compass, 12(10), 794–806.Google Scholar
Leeker, M., Schipper, I., & Beyes, T. (2016). Performativity, performance studies and digital cultures. In Leeker, M., Schipper, I. & Beyes, T., eds., Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Culture, Bielefel: Transcript Verlag, pp. 9–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lemmings, D., & Brooks, A. (2014). The emotional turn in the humanities and social sciences. In Lemmings, D. & Brooks, A., eds., Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 3–18.Google Scholar
Letherby, G., & Reynolds, G. (2005). Train Tracks: Work, Play and Politics on the Railways, Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Lewis, J. @ArmsControlWonk (21 September 2021). I find it very irritating … Twitter Page. https://twitter.com/armscontrolwonk/status/1440373270302261252?s=21.Google Scholar
Li, K., & Biommaert, J. (2020). Please abuse me: Ludic-carnivalesque female masochism on Sina Weibo. Gender and Language, 14(1), 28–48.Google Scholar
Lovell, M. (1987). Reading eighteenth-century American family portraits: Social images and self-images. Winterthur Portfolio, 22, 243–26.Google Scholar
Lupton, D. (2020). Vital materialism and the thing-power of lively data. In Leahy, D., Fitzpatrick, K., & Wright, J., eds., Social Theory and Health Education: Forging New Insights in Research, London: Routledge, pp. 71–80.Google Scholar
Lupton, D. (2018). Vitalities and visceralities: Alternative body/food politics in digital media. In Phillipov, M. & Kirkwood, K., eds., Alternative Food Politics: From the Margins to the Mainstream, London: Routledge, pp. 151–68.Google Scholar
Lutzky, U., & Lawson, R. (2019). Gender politics and discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading and #manterruption on Twitter. Social Media & Society 5(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119861807.Google Scholar
MacDonald, S. (2021). What do you (really) meme? Pandemic memes as social political repositories. Leisure Sciences, 43(1–2), 143–51.Google Scholar
Maddern, P. (2017). Reading faces: How did late medieval Europeans interpret emotions in faces? Postmedieval, 8, 12–34.Google Scholar
Makhortykh, M., & González Aguilar, J. M. (2020). Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine. Continuum, 34(3), 342–62.Google Scholar
Marini, M. Alessandro Ansani, Fabio Paglieri, Fausto Caruana & Marco Viola (2021). The impact of facemasks on emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification. Scientific Reports, 11, 5577. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84806-5.Google Scholar
Matt, S. J., & Fernandez, L. (2019). Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology from the Telegraph to Twitter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McCosker, A., & Gerrard, Y. (2021). Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. New Media & Society, 23(7), 1899–919.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCulloch, G. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, New York: Riverhead Books.Google Scholar
McQuire, S., & Radywyl, N. (2010). From object to platform: Art, digital technology and time. Time & Society, 19(1), 5–27.Google Scholar
Meek, J. (2017). Risk! Pleasure! Affirmation! Navigating queer urban spaces in twentieth-century Scotland. In Simonton, D. there are 8 authors., ed., The Routledge Handbook of the History of Gender and Urban Experience. London: Routledge, pp. 385–96.Google Scholar
Merrill, S., & Lindgren, S. (2021). Memes, brands and the politics of post-terror togetherness: Following the Manchester bee after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2403–21.Google Scholar
Milner, R. M. (2016). The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Miltner, K. M. (2014). ‘There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats’: The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet meme. First Monday, 19(8), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i8.Google Scholar
Mitra, S. (2020). Memes, fears and suicide. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 55(9), 927–27.Google ScholarPubMed
Moreno-Almeida, C. (2020). Memes as snapshots of participation: The role of digital amateur activists in authoritarian regimes. New Media & Society, 23(6), 1545–66.Google Scholar
Moyn, S. (2006). Empathy in history, empathizing with history. History and Theory, 45, 397–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-right, Winchester: Zero Books.Google Scholar
Nash, A. (2016). Affect, people, and digital social networks. In Tettegah, S. Y., ed., Emotions, Technology, and Social Media: Communication of Feelings for, with, and through Digital Media, London: Elsevier, pp. 3–21.Google Scholar
Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2015). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ board. New Media & Society, 19(4), 483–501.Google Scholar
Nyffenegger, N. (2018). Blushing, paling, turning green: Hue and its metapoetic function in Troilus and Criseyde. In Nyffenegger, N. & Rupp, K., eds., Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 145–65.Google Scholar
Ott, B. L. Editor - Dana Cloud. (2017). Affect in critical studies. In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.56.Google Scholar
Penney, J. (2020). ‘It’s so hard not to be funny in this situation’: Memes and humor in U.S. youth online political expression. Television & New Media, 21(8), 791–806.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity and Antagonism Online, Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Plamper, J. (2015). The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pollock, D. (1995). Masks and the semiotics of identity. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1(3), 581–97.Google Scholar
Raivio, O. (2016). Classical art memes as an affinity space: A faceted classification of an entertainment page (Pro Gradu thesis, University of Helsinki).Google Scholar
Reckwitz, A. (2012). Affective spaces: A praxeological outlook. Rethinking History, 16(2), 241–58.Google Scholar
Reddy, W. (2001). The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rees, D. (2014). Down in the mouth: Faces of pain. In Boddice, R., ed., Pain and Emotion in Modern History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 164–86.Google Scholar
Rentschler, C. A., & Thrift, S. C. (2015). Doing feminism in the network: Networked laughter and the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme. Feminist Themes, 16(3), 329–59.Google Scholar
Retford, K. (2017). The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Retford, K. (2006). The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Ringrose, J., & Lawrence, E. (2018). Remixing misandry, manspreading, and dick pics: Networked feminist humour on Tumblr. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 686–704.Google Scholar
Rosenwein, B. (2015). Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenwein, B. (2011). Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Roy, D. (2015). Masks and cultural contexts drama education and Anthropology. International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 7, 214–18.Google Scholar
Safra, L., Chevalier, C., Grézes, J., & Baumard, N. (2020). Tracking historical changes in trustworthiness using machine learning analyses of facial cues in paintings. Nature Communications, 11, 4728. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18566-7.Google Scholar
Sandbye, M. (2014). Looking at the family photo album: A resumed theoretical discussion of why and now. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 6(1), 25419. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v6.25419.Google Scholar
Schama, S. (1987). The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, New York: Alfred A. Kopf.Google Scholar
Schankweiler, K., Straub, V., & Wendl, T. (2018). Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scheer, M. (2012). Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion. History and Theory, 51(2), 190–220.Google Scholar
Silvestri, L. E. (2021). Precarity, nihilism, and grace. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(2), 360–77.Google Scholar
Silvestri, L. E. (2018). Memeingful memories and the art of resistance. New Media & Society, 20(11), 3997–4016.Google Scholar
Sover, A. (2018). The Languages of Humor: Verbal, Visual, and Physical Humor, London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, New York: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Stearns, P., & Stearns, C. (1985). Emotionology: Clarifying the history of the emotions and emotional standards. American Historical Review, 90(4), 813–36.Google Scholar
Sutcliffe, A., Maerker, A., & Sleight, S. (2018). History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tandoc, E. C., & Takahashi, B. (2016). Log in if you survived: Collective coping on social media in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. New Media & Society, 19(11), 1778–93.Google Scholar
Turner, V. (1979). Frame, flow and reflection: Ritual and drama as public liminality. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 6(4), 465–99.Google Scholar
Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The discursive power of memes in digital culture: ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. Routledge.Google Scholar
WikiVictorian @wikivictorian (7 September 2021). The Irritating Gentleman … Twitter Page. https://twitter.com/wikivictorian/status/1435013147740487681?s=21.Google Scholar
Wilkins, K. (2014). Valhallolz: Medievalist humor on the internet. Postmedieval, 5, 199–214.Google Scholar
Willenborg, J. P. (2019). To meme, or not to meme: Applying the theory of motivated information management to the provision of support after depressed individuals share suicidal memes (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, ).Google Scholar
Williams, R. (2000). The business of memes: Memetic possibilities for marketing and management. Management Decision, 38(4), 272–9.Google Scholar
Zuboff, S. (2019). Surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action. New Labor Forum, 28(1), 10–29.Google Scholar
- 5
- Cited by