Queer memes: forms and communities of composition.

Queer Memes: Forms and Communities of Composition

A dissertation presented

Abbie Levesque DeCamp

The Department of English

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

English

Northeastern University

Boston, MA

August, 2023

QUEER MEMES: FORMS AND COMMUNITIES OF COMPOSITION

A dissertation presented

Abbie Levesque DeCamp

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of

Northeastern University August 2023

Abstract

Community literacy and writing scholars have a long-held interest in writing that occurs

outside of the classroom environment, especially writing by marginalized people. Following this

tradition, my dissertation explores how queer community literacy is enacted on the internet via

meme making and sharing. In my first chapter, I propose a robust framework for understanding

both the form and social function of memes that accounts for the rapid transformations memes

frequently undergo. Building on the work of other rhetoric and composition scholars, I define

memes as a metageneric form, a way of conceptualizing genres. I also account in this framework

for more unusual or emergent meme forms, such as tik tok audio memes and “shitpost” memes,

by weaving together rhetorical frameworks with visual culture theory. Memes, instead of being

purely a set of formal aspects, are a way of looking which manifests through humor in multiple

modes of composition.

In order to make these arguments, I conducted a qualitative study using both 32

community member interviews and memes themselves. This method allows for a tight focus on

individual’s idiosyncratic interactions with memes in their communities while also building a

wider theory on the social functions of memes in queer communities. A queer methodological

focus, utilizing the XM<LGBT/> schema that I wrote, helps to form the basis for a vocabulary of

analysis that unpacks the ways literacy, power, and marginalization are intertwined with meme

making and consumption practices. This study focuses on meme creators and readers across a

variety of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. My three data-driven chapters

focus on different aspects that arose across interviews. In my second chapter I unpack the ways

queer people utilized memes to develop both their sense of identity and their sense of

community. In my third chapter, I focus on the co-option of language via memes from black,

often transgender, queer community members by white members and eventually the non-queer

social sphere. Finally, I analyze the impact of platforms and communities on the aesthetic and

rhetorical growth of memes as community literacy practices and look toward the future of

memes as new platforms and modes of composition develop.

Acknowledgements

I have been exceptionally lucky to have a big community of support throughout this

project. First and foremost, I have to offer thanks to my chair, Professor Ellen Cushman. This

project, from the very start, could not have happened if you hadn’t been willing to trust in my

vision. Your support has meant the world. Alongside Ellen I have had the support and

mentorship of an exceptional committee. Professor Hillary Chute, Professor KJ Rawson, and

Professor Eric Darnell Pritchard all gave their time and generous feedback to make this project

what it is and to push my thinking further than I ever could have done on my own. There is a rare

kind of feedback that makes you feel like your reader truly understands you and wants you to

succeed, and I had the good fortune to get that from my committee.

I was also lucky to have many mentors outside my committee who shaped me as a

scholar and a person. Professor Carla Kaplan, I am truly indebted to you. I do not think I would

be as confident and hard-working as I am today without you as a model. Your kindness and good

advice has helped me through even the longest writing (and proofing!) sessions. The entire

Digital Scholarship Group through the years was so important to this work. Ash Clark, Syd

Bauman, Sarah Sweeney, Amanda Rust, Sarah Connell, and Professor Julia Flanders all helped

form my understanding of digital humanities and media studies, and I don’t think I could have

found a kinder, friendlier start to my graduate school career than working with you all. Professor

Mya Poe and Professor Neal Lerner were also incredible mentors during my time at

Northeastern, often guiding me through the thornier parts of graduate school and graciously

offering advice and assistance. Even in my undergraduate years, I was lucky to have kind and

generous mentorship. Professor Christine Evans, Professor Clara Ronderos, Professor Mary

Dockray-Miller, and Professor Sonia Perez-Villanueva all gave me so much support. An extra

special thank-you to Chris Clark, who I consider now a friend and was my most formational

writing teacher.

There were many others who influenced my work and scholarly growth. An incomplete

list includes Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Dr. Derek Sparby, Dr. Temptaous McKoy, Dr. Laurie

Nardone, Dr. Cecilia Musselman, and Dr. Ryan Cordell, among many others. If you ever taught

me, twittered with me, or if you were nice to me at a conference – thank you. A special thank

you goes out to all my students over the years. I have had the unique good fortune to teach some

of the smartest, kindest, funniest students to grace the Northeastern University campus. On the

days writing felt hardest, teaching writing kept me going. You all taught me infinitely more than

I ever taught you.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to so many colleagues and friends over the years. Jess

Rizkallah, Jim McGrath, Liz Polcha, Quisqueya Witbeck, Zack Shaw, Heather Brist, Kyle

Wholey, Galen Bunting, Sarah Payne, Jonathan Osborne, Param Ajmera, Kenny Oravetz, Rhya

Moffitt, Malcolm Purinton, Jenny Roesch, Cherice Jones, David Medina, Tieanna Graphenreed,

Ash Liu, and River Pruitt are all part of an, again incomplete, list of friends who showed me

immense kindness through the years.

This project could not exist without the queer meme community members who let me

interview them. Getting to talk with you all made me feel more connected than ever to my own

queerness, and I am so glad we get to share a community. I had so much fun doing those

interviews! I can’t thank you all enough for trusting me with your stories and ideas. I hope I’ve

done them justice here.

Chelsea Bianco, Kay Yamamoto, Cara Messina, Alanna Prince, Eamon Schlotterback,

Avery Blankenship, and Cailin Roles. You are all my nearest and dearest. It is a miracle that you

all put up with me. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have you all around me all the time.

I can never repay you all for the kindness and friendship you’ve shared with me through the

years, but know that I will do my best to try. I hope I’m still having mimosa brunches and

sending you all horrifying memes in groupchats when we’re grey and old. (Special shoutout to

the motherdaughterwives groupchat, which I assume will somehow outlive everyone in it.)

My family has been incredibly supportive over the years. Thank you to my brother

Steven and my sister-in-law Tiffany for always being understanding and for letting me steal my

nieces whenever I could be in town. Thank you to my mother-in-law Lynn and my sisters-in-law

Lindsay and Allie for all the love through the years. An especially big thank you to my parents,

Bruce and Michelle Levesque, who supported and believed in me every step of the way, and

never put a spending limit on my childhood trips to the bookstore. I couldn’t have done this

without you.

My final and fondest thanks are to my husband, David DeCamp. I admire you more than

anyone in the world. Thank you for reading and editing literally every version of this

dissertation. And thank you for loving literally every version of me. I could not describe the

million ways you supported me during this journey, big and small. With any luck, soon I can tell

everyone to address us as the Doctors DeCamp.

Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3

Acknowledgements ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5

Introduction -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9

Chapter 1: Understanding Memes for Academic Fiends --------------------------------------------------------- 23

Chapter 2: Reading is What? Fundamental ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 53

Chapter 3: Yas Queen, Slay: Appropriation, Imagination, and Queers of Color ----------------------------- 89

Chapter 4: Plat(form): Composition, Form, and the Shaping of Memes ------------------------------------ 122

Conclusion ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 151

Appendix ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 165

Introduction

A Personal Background

I was the early 2000s equivalent of what would now be called an “iPad Baby.” I was

constantly on some kind of device, addicted to screen time. We had a home computer when I

was a child, which my parents did their best to limit my time on. I, however, was not to be

deterred. They set up a time limit on my AOL account, which I promptly figured out how to

circumvent. I was constantly sneaking onto the computer. Some of it was for gaming, but more

often it was for the internet. I loved forums. I loved Neopets. I loved GaiaOnline, a popular

forum-based website. In middle school, when we built mini derby cars out of balsa wood for

woodshop class, mine was themed with the avatars of all my online friends on my favorite

forum. During this formative screen time, my preteen self realized she wasn’t straight. I didn’t

realize because of the forums. I don’t know if I even ever really posted about the realization. But

I remember seeing other older teens (and occasionally even adults) on the message boards who

were out. They didn’t make me realize I was bisexual, but they did make me see what at the time

felt like a shimmering possibility: that I could be bisexual and still have a community. That by

being bisexual, I might gain a community.

As an adult, forums dropped from the internet landscape, and social media rose in its

place. I stayed closeted to most people until my early 20s. I didn’t come out to my parents until I

was 28. But during all that time in the closet, I remained chronically online. My social media use

led me to more communities where I could safely vent some of that closet-case energy. Many of

these groups were meme groups. Even the ones that weren’t meme groups had memes posted in

them all the time. Around this time, I was taking a course on qualitative methods with Ellen

Cushman. She asked us to write research proposals so we could look at qualitative research

design and given how much time I spent on the day-to-day looking at memes, I wrote my faux

proposal on qualitative research on queer memes. I was just trying to have a little fun with the

assignment, but as I moved through the program, I realized I was really captivated by the role

queer memes had in my life. They had for me what Barthes calls the “punctum.” They had an

element which pierced me, a sort of delightful wounding which I found myself seeking out.

The seed of this project has its start in the personal, but it grew in scholarly soil. Scholars

across disciplines have been thinking about the role various forms of digital composition have in

our lives. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes discuss in On Multimodality: New Media

in Composition Studies how new media and digital composition work in classroom settings.

Those same authors later discuss in Techne what it means to compose the queer self. Laurie

Gries explores the many lives and iterations of a viral object in Still Life with Rhetoric. Limor

Shifman focuses on memes specifically, what they are and how they function on the internet in

Memes in Digital Culture. Shifman also notes in this book that memes can teach us about digital

culture more generally.

Alongside my interest in composition, I had a long-standing interest in visual culture.

Like my interest in internet culture, this stretched back into my childhood. In fact, one of the

reasons I so loved Neopets and GaiaOnline was their visuality. I learned html and CSS as a child

to decorate my Neopets page, and later my MySpace page. GaiaOnline had customizable avatars

you could dress up. I even learned pixel art to create my own styles for my avatar. I spent many

of my online hours fashioning these images. As an adult, I found new language to understand my

own interest in online visuality. The work of WJT Mitchell, for instance, is foundational to this

work. His idea in “What Do Pictures Want,” that images might have their own desires tied

directly into Gries’s insistence that we take internet images on their own terms. An image with

desire was an idea that compelled me to look at memes not just as written compositions but as

multimodal ones. The first desire I understood from a meme was that it was meant to be read and

to be looked at, and that formed my understanding of them as objects. I was also moved by

Roland Barthes’ descriptions of photography in Camera Lucida. His idea of the stadium (the

semiotic analysis of the image) and the punctum (the emotional response to an image) were

pivotal to connecting the meme itself to the ways people interacted with them. Mitchell and

Barthes both understood that there are strong emotional components to people’s interactions with

images, and their articulation of concepts like desire and punctum helped me better understand

both the multimodal composition and the writing practices described by my participants.

These, among many other texts, motivated me to explore what memes are, and what

memes do as compositions. Given it was the meme community I was most familiar with, I

decided to explore those questions through the queer meme community. I wanted to combine

Gries’s interest in circulation, Shifman’s interest in definitions and functions, Alexander and

Rhodes interest in rhetoric, composition, new media, and queerness, and Barthes and Mitchell’s

interests in image and emotion. Together, these combinations give new insights into what a

meme is and has the potential to become, as well as what they do for the people reading and

writing them.

The questions that motivate this dissertation is: what are queer memes as multimodal

compositions? How do queer memes function as compositions within communities of people? I

want to keep my eyes on both the thing itself (the meme) and the people it touches. To do so, I

combine community literacy approaches with visual culture theory and queer theory in a

qualitative study.

A note on queer methodology

As I delved into this project, I embraced queer methodologies as a form of knowledge

making. As Deborah Kuzawa writes in “Queering Composition,” “Queerness at its core

embraces ambiguity, excess, and instability, whereas methods represent logics that provide

structure for inquiry. So when we discuss a queer method, we are discussing a contradiction in

terms: unstable and ambiguous logics and ways of knowing” (150). For me, that meant picking

and choosing from a variety of methods, including archiving, scrolling, interviewing, and coding.

I am seeking to better understand the messy, funny, contradicting inner lives of queer meme

writers and of queer memes - and in many ways this resists straightforward ideas of qualitative

methodology. Where I felt that resistance I embraced excess and ambiguity and sought other

ways of making meaning.

My project emerged from several interests coalescing together, and thus navigates several

fields and ways of thinking at once. At its core, what I want to unpack here is how queer people

compose on the internet. Memes were chosen first because they are such a common and

quotidian form on the internet, and they are widely accessible. Despite being so common memes

are rarely analyzed as compositions. Because I am interested in what queer memes are as pieces

of multimodal composing, I situate this work in writing studies, and specifically as community

literacy. However, the more I delved into the research, the more I wrestled with the idea of what

writing was. This question is not a new one. I specifically struggled to articulate what parts of the

composition process were writing in an object where the visual form was such an intrinsic part of

the final composition. That is, neither the visual nor the textual in the meme are legible on their

own - it is only together that the coherent meaning of the meme is legible.

I sought a framework that, like community literacy, could focus both on composition and

on larger community, cultural, and social factors. With this in mind, I wove visual culture theory

into my writing studies analysis. Visual culture theory often intersects with the other field of

theory I bring into this project, queer theory. These fields of theory help explain the relationship

between form and meaning, especially within the communities making these memes. These

theoretical tools, alongside community literacy studies research, helped me come to a cohesive

definition of a meme and analyze individual memes to understand them as multimodal

compositions within the queer community.

Alongside these academic theories of visuality and queerness, I still sought to understand

memes as compositions within a community. That is, these are compositions that circulate within

(and without) communities. They contain community-specific language, mediate community

connections, and on occasion even have influence over the material conditions of community

members. Visual and queer theory could help me understand how to make sense of the objects,

but it was community literacy and empirical writing research that I felt could help me understand

the human side of these compositions. I needed both the understanding of the object and its

forms as well as the understanding of the communities of writers and readers making and

intaking them to understand memes fully as queer composition.

Methods

In the most straightforward terms, for this dissertation I created an archive of queer

memes curated off of several sites and off my own personal meme archive that I have

accumulated over my years of being queer online.

I interviewed 32 queer meme community

This archive resulted in a snowball sample of 167 memes from a variety of groups and sites, but was not analyzed

as part of the data and instead some served as example memes throughout this text. It is a private archive currently

members, from lurkers to content creators, in order to make sense of what memes do.

I asked

them about their own composing, reading, and circulation practices, their queer meme

communities, and the roles memes had in their lives. The initial set of questions for these semi-

structured interviews is available in the appendix. Queer meme community members already

understood how memes functioned for them. As part of the larger methodology of this project, I

analyze the responses of my participants as a source of knowledge. I encourage readers to see

large block quotes as an opportunity to hear directly from the participants, in their own words. I

qualitatively coded the transcripts of these interviews iteratively for themes around queerness

and writing.

During the qualitative coding of these interviews, I marked several tags which, together,

can help academics better understand the ways community literacy surfaces in the world of queer

memes. For qualitative coding, I used an updated version of the XM<LGBT/> framework that I

refined for this dissertation, and the RelaxNG code for this is available in the appendix

(DeCamp). For instance, I used a <sharedHumor>

tag to mark when participants discussed

humor that they rhetorically marked as in-group humor. As in previous work, this follows

Stephanie Kershbaum’s framework for marking difference, and was narrowed here to apply

specifically to these rhetorical practices when discussing humor. I also use tags to mark the

discussion of literacy events, queerness, and interactions with others. This mix of codes helps

stored in Tropy. As it did not end up being part of the larger data and instead served as a repository, I mention it here

simply for methodological transparency.

A lurker is a participant in the group who does not post or interact with others. The categories are broadly known

categories for online interaction, but within this project are used more specifically for ease of categorizing types of

participant behaviors. These categories are not intended to be rigid, but do help delineate the different literacy acts

that participants saw themselves as involved in.

Both the archived memes and participants were found via snowball sampling.

A full breakdown of all tags, their attributes, and their usage cases is available in the appendix.

shine light on the variety of ways communities and community literacy are discussed by meme

community members.

This schema yielded a variety of data points surrounding my research questions. For

instance, as I began this project, one of my research questions revolved around the relationship

between people, platforms, and memes. During my first iterative round of encoding, I started

with just the element <platform/>. Over several rounds of coding, I refined a set of attributes

associated with that element. During the first round of coding, I marked where interview

participants mentioned a platform while discussing memes, for instance if they mentioned

Tumblr. In subsequent coding I created an open list of what these instances talked about in

regards to platforms, including both uses of platforms and feelings about platforms. I refined and

categorized this list into the attributes listed in the schema, and then included the attributes where

the element had been marked. Once all the rounds of coding were completed, I was able to run

XSLT scripts of given elements. As I coded, I took note of what ideas stood out as thematic

through lines within the interviews. When writing the case studies, I would pull forward

instances of discussions on the topic. For instance, in chapter four, I pulled instances of the

element <platform/>. I would then analyze what tags it frequently occurred alongside and what

the discussions participants were having when they talked about platform. From there I would

select the case studies that helped best illustrate the ideas and nuances being discussed. Some

research questions, like the role of reading as a community literacy practice in queer memes,

developed as a result of the coding practice. I had coded an element <literacy/> to mark acts, and

when experimenting with attributes, I found there was much more overlap and nuance than my

initial straightforward categorization of reading and writing had accounted for. I ended up not

using attributes as a result of this complexity and instead dedicated a chapter to the overlap and

interwoven nature of reading in literacy and composition acts around memes.

This mix of methods comes from a wide selection of scholars. Tobias Raun and Addie

Schrodes both collect data via “strolling,” which I often mis-read as “scrolling” and serves as one

of the ways I accumulated data. Many of my interviews were obtained by random and snowball

sampling - I flyered campus and posted in several meme groups, where one group in particular

had several members contact me to participate. The use of interviews was inspired by work like

Eric Darnell Pritchard’s Fashioning Lives, which utilizes a variety of qualitative methods. Their

methods included archive building and analysis, literary close-reading, and community member

interviews to help construct knowledge. Like Pritchard, I have a variety of participants who I

interviewed about their literacy practices and communities, which I then qualitatively coded. I

used this qualitative coding alongside close-reading of memes to connect the data I gathered with

theories of visuality.

Methodology

I consider myself working with a queer methodology grounded as well in crip, quare,

and queer of color theories and understandings. Other works that heavily influenced my

methods and methodologies include Ellen Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools, Beverly

Moss’s A Community Text Arises and the Re/orienting Writing Studies collection, as well as

scholars like Vyshali Manivannan, J. Logan Smilges, M. Remi Yergaau, and Stephanie

Kershbaum, Seth E. Davis, Caroline Dadas, and E. Patrick Johnson have all had a significant

impact on the ways I conduct research and the lens I view queerness through. What these

scholars share is a commitment to composition methodologies that are grounded in social justice,

understandings of marginalization, difference, and power. These works undergird how I

understand the connections between race, disability, queerness, and other forms of

marginalization. What they share in common is an investment in dismantling harmful systems of

power, understanding communities across various layers of difference, and intersectional

approaches to their research.

Queer rhetoric and composition scholar Hillery Glasby writes in “Making it Queer, Not

Clear,” “Rather than conclude, I return to the beginning; rather than answer, I ask: What if, as

these scholars recommend, composition was motivated to explore the tension of ambivalence

and failure?” (39). A mix of queer theory, qualitative data, and meme reading all together make

for a complex but generative data set. As Glasby notes, tension, ambivalence, and failure are all

not only useful to be able to sit with as part of queer methods, but help navigate and produce new

ways of understanding. Where I failed to make meaning in one method, I would turn to another.

My aim, then, is not necessarily replicability or validity but simply a description of how I made

meaning from the knowledge I was given. This “dissident ethos” (31) helped me make meaning

where traditional academic order felt short.

Meaning, of course, is not the same as results, nor are traditional results the only useful

outcome for qualitative research. These questions and possibilities, too, are useful to sit with as

part of queer methods. During this research, I explored methodological questions like: What does

it mean to make meaning (and how does that tie into or interfere with making “results”)? What

does it mean to use empirical data and “theory” (as in queer theory) together? When and where

can we bend the rules around methods in order to make sense of a project? And why do we make

certain choices around methods and methodologies?

For the most part, this project’s methods are not unusual for a qualitative project. Many

scholars have used some mix of interview-driven data with writers, artifacts of writing,

qualitative coding, and some amount of theory (about writing, about queerness, etc) to explore

what a given set of writing is to a community. The gaps, the tensions, the failures and

uncertainties that may arise during the analysis and linger after, however, are productive and,

instead of being discarded, should be sat with and explored. For instance, in an early iteration I

wanted to mark discussions on race, and found myself frustrated at the code’s inability to surface

white queerness as racialized. I eventually scrapped my initial plan, which still did not satisfy me

even with the addition of an <unmarked/> tag, which felt too broad to be useful. My literal

failure to mark race, however, gave me insight into the ways whiteness does and does not surface

in these interviews about queer memes, and eventually led to my understandings in chapter three.

Meaning Making and the Queer Meme

This dissertation focuses on a set of questions surrounding queer meme community

literacy practices. How do memes work as visual-textual objects? How are queer communities

making, reading, and circulating memes? How do the members of these queer meme

communities conceptualize their interactions with memes? And how the digital spaces and places

of these queer meme communities affect contribute to the creation and circulation of queer meme

content?

My main takeaways from this project seek to explore and answer these questions. Memes

are both a multimodal composition with one form pointing to a citational aspects, and another

form pointing to the personal aspect. Memes are also an emotional state of interpretation. Along

this same line, and directly connected to the idea that memes are important literacy practices, is

that feelings are important to memes. They help queer meme community members form

emotional connections, and they help those community members to explore their own emotion

and identities around queerness. The forms these memes take are forged through a variety of

pressures, including larger cultural trends, community interests and history, individual interests

and aesthetics, and the platforms they are made and distributed across. While memes are affected

by all these pressures, they also exert pressure of their own, iteratively shaping and being shaped

by the communities creating them.

Chapter one builds a visual-rhetorical philosophy of memes. I explore both “typical”

image macro memes as well as less easily defined shitpost memes to pursue a definition that

captures the multifaceted, ever-evolving nature of memes. Chapter two explores three meme

community member’s different experiences with various kinds of literacy acts in queer meme

groups. These different kinds of literacy acts help deepen compositions understanding of the

many important roles queer people can have in these queer meme communities. Chapter three

focuses on the ways race and queerness interact in queer meme spaces. Both QTPOC and white

queer meme community members within this project understand their relationship to racialized

queerness in different ways. This ties into a framework for better understanding community-

specific literacy practices. Chapter four analyzes the relationship between platform and visual-

textual form throughout meme evolutions. It envisions a rhizomatic relationship between

communities, forms, and platforms which continually feeds back into each other to create the

rhetorical spaces where memes emerge. Between each chapter I have included an interlude.

These sections present a section from my participant’s interviews, complete with XM<LGBT/>

markup. They each answer the question “what do you want me, as a researcher, to know about

memes that you didn’t get to say?” and feature a response that I found evocative from a

participant that was not individually quoted elsewhere.

To fully understand how memes are being utilized in the communities, it is useful to use

a few different frameworks woven together - this will help untangle the complex knot of queer

memes as community literacy practice. Here, I weave together theories from rhetorical genre

studies (RGS), queer theory, visual culture, and community literacy. These give us a way to put

into conversation the many aspects of memes: their social, visual, literate, and community-

oriented nature, even if they are not the only way to understand memes, nor are they necessarily

complete. Memes act as a queer community literacy practice in the ways they help cohere group

communication practices, determining who has understanding of (and thus belonging to) the

community discourse practices. Their ability to share in-group humor and discourse helps cohere

a constellation of queer communities through the literate practices of writing and reading memes.

I consider this overarching framework as the anchor that holds together these disparate threads of

study.

Works Cited

Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City

Community. State University of New York Press, 1998.

Kuzawa, Deborah. “Queer/ing Composition, The Digital Archive of Literacy Narrative, and

Ways of Knowing.” Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects,

edited by William P Banks et al., University Press of Colorado, 2019, pp. 150–68.

JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvdmx0hm.13. Accessed 26 May 2023.

Moss, Beverly J. A Community Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literacy Tradition in African-

American Churches. United States, Hampton Press, 2003.

Kerschbaum, Stephanie L. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference. Conference on College

Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of English, 2014.

Pritchard, Eric Darnell. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy. Southern

Illinois University Press, 2017.

Raun, Tobias. Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on Youtube.

United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.

Shrodes, Addie. “Humor as Political Possibility: Critical Media Literacy in LGBTQ+

Participatory Cultures.” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, 2021, pp. 855–76.

Interlude

All right. Before we wrap up, do you have any last things that you want to say about your meme

experiences, or anything?</speaker>

Oh, mostly just that I don't know what I would do if I ... It sounds silly, I guess, if you can't

resonate with it, but I literally don't know what I would do without the validating feeling that I

get when I see queer memes, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm not alone. There are other people

feeling like this." And also now, I get to laugh at this thing, which fills my life with joy.

</sharedHumor></queer></meme>

Chapter 1: Understanding Memes for Academic Fiends

A Definition of Memes

This chapter focuses on the object of a meme and outlines an understanding of that object

of analysis. In order to understand what memes do for participants in the following chapters, I

first want to unpack what they are and how they function as rhetorical, visual, multimodal

objects. I explore two overlapping definitions of a meme. The first defines memes through their

form and social actions. Memes are multimodal compositions where one mode is citational or

referential, and another mode is personal. Put simply, one part points out to shared cultural

knowledge or objects that the reader is meant to recognize, and the other part points inward, and

makes the viewer identify with the meme. The other definition I argue for is an affectively

motivated one. A meme in this definition is something that feels like a meme, and that the reader

engages with in the same affective space as they would other memes.

While my later chapters are driven by how participants describe their interactions with

and usage of memes, this chapter functions as a philosophy of understanding the image of the

meme itself rather than focusing on memes as an act of community literacy. I seek to explore

with this philosophy what Laurie Gries notes in “Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research

Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies.” She writes that,

In visual rhetoric, scholars have simply transposed this reading practice onto images in

order to decipher how images communicate and construct certain identifications and

ways of seeing… this deeply engrained habitus of method moves scholars to treat images

as language-like symbols and stable, transitive texts, which need to be interpreted within

the contexts of their production in order to explain how they function and what they are

likely to mean for a particular audience (Foss, 2004). Often inherent in this habitus is the

belief that images, like other artifacts, are mediums of communication that lack agency

This structure, “x memes for y fiends” is one of several rhyming scheme names that are common for meme groups.

Occasionally, fiends is replaced with another word that rhymes with memes, such as teens. One of the most famous

examples, and one that a few participants mentioned, is “wild green memes for ecological fiends,” which has about

700,000 members on Facebook.

unless scholars project onto images their own explanations of intention, meaning, and

significance. (336)

Gries is working through two ideas in particular that this project is invested in. First, is the

recognition that visual rhetoric should recognize the unique aspects of image, and have a

philosophy of image that recognizes them as unique from text (but, as she explains elsewhere in

the article, still particularly rhetorical.) That is, Gries believes that images are rhetorical objects,

but are distinctly not textual and should be looked at on their own terms as visual, composed

objects.

Like Gries’ work, this project takes memes on their own terms as image-text objects.

The second idea that Gries explores is the agency of the image, and the way that image exists

alongside and outside of the agency of the creator of the image. Gries asserts that images have a

sort of will of their own in their many circulations and interpretations across time and place. I

work to unpack how that agency of the image unfolds with memes in particular, and align

Gries’s understanding of the image as a rhetorician with the understanding of images of those in

visual culture studies.

In this chapter I seek to understand the complex object through which community literacy

acts are taking place. In later chapters, I will turn to participants' data to understand how memes

help queer community members take part in various literacy acts and what meaning they make

with those acts. I focus here on the rhetorical philosophy of the image-text object of the meme

itself.

Memes are a large part of internet culture - many colleges feature meme-sharing groups,

and sites like Reddit and Tumblr circulate memes as a way of establishing “in jokes'' for their

On occasion I do refer to “reading” or “writing” a meme. This is not to imply that the visual portion of the image is

textual. Instead, “reading” is term I employ for a mix of closely-looking using visual culture theory as its

underpinnings, and textual reading. “Writing” is shorthand in these cases for multimodal compositions that include

both visual and textual elements.

groups. In particular, there is a section of meme culture that circulates jokes by and for the

LGBTQ+ population. These jokes help pose a set of questions. How do these memes function

within the LGBTQ+ community? What kinds of humor do they use, and why do they seem so

popular as a way for young LGBTQ+ people to establish themselves in a community? Who is

making these memes and how do they circulate as social objects? If we wish to take queer

writing seriously, it is important to articulate theories of quotidian, everyday writing in

communities. In this way, I hope to follow the traditions of writers like Serkan Görkemli and

Eric Darnell Pritchard, who both write on everyday writing artifacts. Pritchard in particular

highlights the importance of these raced, gendered, and classed everyday literacies by analyzing

them alongside more mainstream school literacies to help demonstrate the important ways non-

school literacy practices help form the literate lives of people.

I want to start by unpacking how rhetorical genre studies can give us ways to understand

memes. Limor Shifman, in her foundational work on memes, extensively unpacks memes as

rhetorical genres. In her framework, community members facing recurring rhetorical situations

help create and modify genres to meet shared rhetorical needs. This understanding can then

helpfully be tied into community literacy studies. Memes, with their repetitive forms and social

nature, help pinpoint the way recurrent social and rhetorical action function in community

literacy. By social nature, I mean that memes circulate on social platforms like Facebook and Tik

Tok, and are created to be shared and remade by others. I want to build further on Shifman’s

theories by exploring two additional aspects of RGS theory in regards to memes. First, I want to

discuss form as part of meme genres. Second, I want to add the idea of a “metagenre” to our

understanding of memes.

Since the foundational works in genre studies, there has been a move away from form

and formalism. As Amy Devitt notes in her 2009 chapter “Re-fusing Form in Genre Studies,”

RGS, like much of rhetoric and composition, has been neglecting form in favor of social action.

She writes that while Carolyn Miller, in her foundational 1984 essay, called for using substance,

form, and action, Miller’s prioritizing of action was a reaction to earlier critic’s emphasis on

form in theories of genre. Devitt notes, however, that this reactive privileging of social action has

led to an almost total disregard of how form functions alongside social action in the current state

of rhetorical genre studies. However, Devitt also writes, the earliest practitioners of RGS rejected

not form, but formalism. Formalism, for Devitt, is the focus only on form, disregarding social

actions and context. This focus purely on form is rejected because of the investment RGS, and

rhetoric and composition more widely as a field, have in social action and context as part of

writing and rhetorical interpretation. Indeed, she writes that instead of rejecting and refusing

form in genre studies,

The answer, instead, is to acknowledge the two-sidedness, the simultaneity, the

inseparability of form, meaning, and action, of individual, social, and cultural context, of

actual genres and genre-ness. Such a fusion is far more difficult and far more satisfying

as genre study continues into its next twenty years of vital research. (46)

It is not only RGS that, in turning to the social, rejected form - this move has happened across

much of composition research. I apply Devitt’s ideas on form across my woven theory of memes

- I believe we should not only re-fuse form into genre studies but that re-fusing form will allow

me to articulate the interplay of practice, form, and social action in a way that lends us deeper

understanding of queer memes and of rhetorical genre studies. This facilitates a more capacious

understanding of genre and its role in community literacy practices. In order to re-fuse form into

rhetorical genre studies, I draw on visual culture studies.

Visual culture studies offers theories invested in both the social/cultural and in form,

without falling into formalism. Since memes are multimodal, it is useful using visual culture and

visual rhetorical theory within the frameworks of community literacy and rhetorical genre will

help more robustly explain the social, cultural, and generic aspects of memes. It will also help

all three fields to better understand the ways text and visuals create hybrid internet objects with a

dialectical effect, and how we might better understand those objects and the ways and reasons

users create them.

In “Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes” (DeCamp) I write that memes are metageneric. I

use metageneric here as defined by Michael Carter - a way of thinking and understanding

different kinds of writing situations. An individual meme form, like text over a given image

macro, may be an example of a meme genre, as Limor Shifman asserts in her work on memes.

Encompassing the individual meme genres is the idea of a meme itself, which is metageneric in

nature - it is a way of understanding the writing situation of memes broadly. As one can think of

empirical writing with a certain mindset, so too can one think of meme writing with a meme-ish

mindset.

Why memes, though, as an aspect of everyday literacy? Memes in many ways dominate

the current cultural imagination. Many memes are short lived, and specific instances of a meme

often comment on hyper-specific situations,. These memes often do not have lasting meaning

outside of that context. As a result, any given individual meme type becomes passé to users as

new content is being memed and taking over the cultural zeitgeist. They are, like many

An image macro is a form of meme where an image is circulated with various kinds of text over it. Eline Zenner

and Dirk Geeraerts define them as “text superimposed on an image. Whereas the image and discursive theme are

typically fairly consistent in the replication process, the text of image macros is particularly open to the online

“remix culture” that characterizes Internet memes (see Vickery 2014: 312)” (“One does not simply process memes:

Image macros as multimodal constructions” 171). For more on image macros, see Kate Brideau and Charles Barret’s

"A brief introduction to impact: ‘The meme font’." in Journal of Visual Culture; and Patrick Davison’s "The

language of internet memes." In The Social Media Reader.

ephemera, not meant to last as individual instances, but still have a lasting cultural impact as a

whole. Despite their short life cycles, memes appear in major cultural productions that are not as

ephemeral, like movies. For instance, Spiderman: No Way Home features a scene of the three

multiverse spidermen pointing at each other. This is a reference to a popular meme of three

cartoon spidermen pointing at each other. Memes dominate many forms of social media,

including Facebook, Tumblr, and twitter. Most people who use the internet now interact with

memes on a daily basis. From a community literacy standpoint, I am invested in unpacking the

relationship between these everyday interactions queer meme community members have with

memes and the way these ephemeral compositions come to hold greater meaning to these

communities.

This is a compelling aspect of the meme as an image-text object: it is somehow both

lasting, and ephemeral. James Morris tackles how social media can have lasting real-world

impacts in his piece “Simulacra in the Age of Social Media: Baudrillard as the Prophet of Fake

News.” He writes, “Baudrillard recognised almost 40 years ago that media no longer perform the

classic linguistic function of meaningful reference to the real world. Instead, they point towards

an idealised simulacrum, an advertising-driven aspirational utopia, but with dire implications for

political life” (333). Morris outlines how the fleeting, click-bait driven journalism of the social

media age and “fake news” memes themselves are not particularly lasting compositions, but that

the ways they affect civic life are. While fake news is not a focus of this dissertation, it does help

highlight the multiple natures of memes - potentially dangerous, lighthearted fun; potentially

impactful, ephemeral compositions.

The scope of this dissertation does not include how archival studies and theory may help make sense of these

objects. In library and information science there is already some discussion about the preservation of memes in

archives, like García López & Martínez Cardama’s “Strategies for Preserving Memes as Artefacts of Digital

Culture.”

To understand this complex nature and define what memes are, they must be understood

both formally and socially as rhetorical objects in motion, where the circulation as well as the

various community members involved in that circulation, all contribute to the understanding of

the meme as a whole. It is also important when defining memes to take seriously the humor

involved in memes. To read these memes against and with other forms of community literacy

practices is to take seriously the power of writing and of humor as part of community literacy.

Taking the humor queer meme groups produce seriously gives a more nuanced understanding of

their (our) communication practices. And indeed, for queer communities, there are aspects of

both community building and resistance available through humor that scholars should take

seriously. In Caty Borum’s “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and

Civic Power '' she outlines the ways activists use comedy and comedians practice activism. In

rhetoric and composition, Addie Shrodes’ “Humor as Political Possibility: Critical Media

Literacy in LGBTQ+ Participatory Cultures” demonstrates the way LGBTQ+ use satire in their

literacy acts in order to disrupt dominant ideologies. I also outline the importance of taking

humor seriously in “Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes.”

Scholars of memes often describe them through their behaviors. Shifman in particular has

a useful definition of memes as sets of behaviors resulting in genres. Scholars like Gries in Still

Life with Rhetoric articulate the way objects like memes circulate and change over time.

Both of these approaches are vital to understanding what memes are, and when brought

together give a powerful framework that brings into view both the agentive object in circulation

that Gries describes as well as the communities and the literacy acts that take part in that

circulation. Gries also embraces an understanding of memes as visual-textual objects that should

be understood on their own terms.

If visual-textual objects like memes are a community literacy practice, it is important not

only to take into account the textual features of a literacy object, but the visual features as well.

By bringing in visual culture as part of a community literacy analysis, community literacy can

build robust ways of understanding how communities use their literacy practices. This is

especially true because of visual culture’s investment in taking visuals on their own terms and in

its investment in the cultural situatedness of visual objects. Visual culture helps community

literacy articulate what is happening in visual-textual literacy objects in a way that considers the

culture surrounding the object, taking the object on its own terms, and the means by which the

communities produce and read them. Essentially, what I see as a useful way to understand

memes is to see them as a set of community literacy practices, and within those practices the

visual, social, and literate aspects must be considered together to have a full understanding of

what the meme is doing. What we gain is a way of making sense of the multiple ways

community members utilize their queer meme literacies, and how those literacy acts in

circulation can make and unmake meaning for the community. With this we can begin to

formulate ways of protecting marginalized community members and making meaning in more

thoughtful ways.

Memes cannot be understood in isolation from the various community members reading

and writing them. Community literacy helps here in situating memes as objects interacting with

people in social spheres. However, to only bring in community literacy would leave a gap in

addressing the aspects of memes as generic, rhetorical objects in motion. Rhetorical genre

studies can help make sense of this aspect of understanding. Rhetorical genre studies sees form

as a mark of typified social action, and thus formal elements that manifest as genre conventions

over time actually happen because of actions in a cultural-historical activity sphere. Combining

community literacy studies and RGS helps connect literacy actions, including visual literacy

actions, in a community to the formal elements manifesting through typified social action. So,

with these frameworks articulated, I would like to pull them together to make a working

definition of a meme: A meme is a playful multimodal composition where one mode or aspect

points to shared cultural knowledge, and the other mode or aspect points to the self of the reader,

and this aspect changes in each different iterations of the meme.

The most well-known version of memes is the image macro with text overlaid on it. In

these memes, the mode of shared cultural knowledge is usually a still from a popular cultural

production, like a TV show, that the creator assumes their audience all has shared knowledge of.

The overlaid text is used to point to the self, and changes throughout the iterations of the meme.

Many scholars have tackled the problem of defining a meme over the years. As Limor Shifman

notes, “A core problem of memetics, maybe the core quandary, is the exact meaning of the term

‘meme.’” Shifman’s definition looks to capture some of the outliers from these conversations,

writing that “Reassessing these standpoints, I suggest a different approach to defining memes.

This suggestion is based on two rather simple principles: (a) looking at diffused units as

incorporating several memetic dimensions —namely, several aspects that people may imitate;

and (b) understanding memes not as single entities that propagate well, but as groups of content

units with common characteristics. I will soon demonstrate how these two principles produce a

workable definition of Internet memes.” Shifman here aligns with what meme makers on the

ground have noticed. I highlight this in “Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes,” where Kyle

Wholey notes Tik Toks are recognizable as memes because both have an original formal element

(text, image, sound) to make the meme relatable or humorous, and another formal element to be

the citational or referential element in order to make the meme signal certain kinds of community

knowledge and humor.

My formal definition is also consistent with Shifman’s own reasoning around memes vs.

viral objects. It also aligns with Shifman’s idea that imitation and groups of content units are

vital to memes as a practice. I understand my definition to mean that memes depend on social

and cultural understandings of form to properly communicate. Overall, memes being defined as

multimodal compositions where one mode is citational and the other mode is personal captures

much of the content people consume as memes, as well as satisfies my own interest in tying form

to sociality.

A straightforward definition of a meme is multimodal content that contains two “parts,”

where one part is re-usable and meant to signal shared cultural knowledge and one part that is

added to by individual creators to make a meme relatable or humorous. Still, as someone who

grew up very online and who has been an avid consumer of memes for most of my life, I feel

there is more to say about the core quandary of defining a meme. I turn here to an interview

snippet with a participant named Rory to guide my analysis:

Because there are some text posts that I saved because I think they're funny, but I

wouldn't necessarily call them memes. But maybe the idea within the post is a meme.

There's the whole thing right now about being gay is about yearning… So I feel like the

yearning thing is a meme, but not necessarily all of ... but all of the posts about it aren't

necessarily memes… Yeah, I feel like it primarily comes down to a certain level of

abstraction and shared experience or emotional response to it. I feel like there has to be a

strong emotional response for it to be a meme. I've never seen a meme that I didn't have a

reaction to, I guess.

Several participants noted, despite it not being one of my interview questions, that text

posts like those recognized by Rory were memes. In addition, a genre known as “shitposts” are

also often included under the meme umbrella. Shitposts are a form of text posting on sites like

tumblr and twitter focused on absurdity and a purposeful “anti-joke” style. They might feature

purposeful misspellings, over-explaining of a joke, or nonsensical observations. Many of these

posts may have units of imitation (the “idea” meme first noted by Dawkins and acknowledged as

part of Shifman’s work) but lack the content units that Shifman notes. Text posts and shitposts

sometimes lack both, and yet many users still recognize them as memes. I believe it is Rory’s

observation that allows a useful expansion to Shifman’s definition.

Rory notes the affective experience of the meme when they say “I've never seen a meme

that I didn't have a reaction to.” What Rory points toward is the personal portion of the social

sphere of memes, one that could use attention. That is, our inner experience of memes is vital to

how we understand, and thus define them. A meme requires response, and that response is at

least on some level, an emotional one. This is an evocative statement - all memes require

reaction. It is intriguing to think through what it means to take Rory at their word on this. If a

meme requires a response, then a meme with no response ceases to be a meme for that act of

literacy. It also surfaces the entanglement between “response” literacy acts - like likes and shares

- and emotion. To “react” and thus respond is difficult to separate from emotional response. To

not have an emotional response of some sort tied into these actions would be to not react - to

scroll by without acknowledgement. Even a meme that evokes disgust, anger, or a cringe is still

evoking an emotional response (though perhaps not the one the author was hoping for.) Even a

like for social pressure is tied into this. For instance, a like given for fear of being left out of a

group dynamic is still a reaction tied to emotion. If genres are social actions, then perhaps

sometimes they fail to “be” a genre for specific readers, even if they do work for others. Perhaps

one can recognize the “form” of a genre and see something that we know is meant to be a meme,

but without the affective component of “response” it fails some kind of rhetorical checkpoint for

the reader. No matter what, it is clear that at least to Rory, reaction is an integral part of their

experience with memes.

For meme readers like Rory, a feeling of kinship, anger, or laughter is central to the

“meme-ness” of a meme. A meme can elicit that affective experience even outside of the

traditional image macro format. For instance, Rory specifically mentions the “being gay is about

yearning” meme. This meme appeared in several genres across both traditional image macros

and less traditional meme forms like the text post. The crux that each of these memes had in

common was poking fun at how the queer experience is about “yearning” - sometimes

specifically for a significant other but often left vague. What turned the idea of queer yearning

into a meme? Rory states “Yeah, I feel like it primarily comes down to a certain level of

abstraction and shared experience or emotional response to it.” That idea of a shared experience

for Rory, the feeling of laughing about the playful presentation and of other people also feeling

that same affective experience, is partially how memes are determined.

Shitposts and non-memes-turned-memes highlight the usefulness of including the feeling

of a meme as part of our definition of it. Thus, part of how one defines a meme is that it feels like

a meme. “It feels like a meme” is about the connection of reader and composer to the object

presented to them. A composer may not intend something to be a meme and yet have readers

interpret it that way, and some composers may make something intending its playfulness to be

obvious only to have readers take it seriously. To identify a meme, it must be observed in

circulation, not isolation. In a theoretical sense, it seems that some objects

“ask” to be memes in

different ways.

Whether an image macro, shitpost, etc

I return to Rory’s quote: “I've never seen a meme that I didn't have a reaction to, I guess.”

I returned to this idea frequently as I worked on this project: that a meme is not just a set of

forms, but also a reaction. This is not to say memes are not a set of forms at all - instead, that

both the forms and the reaction can turn something into a meme, and that a meme is something

determined in relation to others. A non-meme can become a meme, if a reader decides to take it

in the meme “spirit.”

These intertwined and tangled relationships between queerness, memes, forms,

communities, cultures, and platforms continue to evolve. For instance, during the late stages of

this project, the “holy fucking bingle” meme started. A trans woman hacker, maia arson crimew,

obtained and leaked the US No-Fly list, and posted a screenshot of her Sprigatito plush

announcing it with “holy shit, we actually have the nofly list. holy fucking bingle. what?! :3"

Figure 1: “Holy fucking bingle” post from maia arson crimew’s blog.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme1

“Holy fucking bingle” took off immediately among queer meme groups. What is it that

makes this a meme? This post initially eludes the “form” of memes, since it is not a cultural

knowledge template meant to be switched out with new text that the audience can identify with.

But “Holy fucking bingle” has its own page on the Know Your Meme wiki, and it was taken up

as a meme. So what made this thing, what Limor Shifman would classify as a “viral object,” a hit

queer meme? There are a few aspects that act as that meme punctum. The Sprigatito plush

signals a kind of cutesy tone that Maia, and some other trans woman hackers, enjoy. It ties into

Maia’s pink website and general UwU

aesthetic. Sprigatitio is a Pokemon, and thus ties in as

well to the nerd culture aspects of UwU culture. The use of the :3 emoji ties into this as well - it

comes from early-2000s forum culture, and emoji associated with cats and cute naughtiness. Add

to this the text - holy fucking bingle! Bingle, a nonsense word, up against swearing, is the sort of

dissonance that is already popular in meme culture. Together, these signs add up to a

destabilizing irreverence. After all, Maia had leaked the US No-Fly list with this post. The thing

that made this a meme was that contrast, the cute Pokémon and language alongside a very real

act of queer defiance against US surveillance mechanisms and state power. Not every viral

object like this is a meme, but Maia’s post became a meme because certain elements, like the

contrast between the silly cuteness of the form and the gravity of the action it announced, made it

feel like a meme. And this feeling, the jokey absurdity of it all, was received in the same manner

as memes by the audience. When Barthes theorized photographs in Camera Lucida, he said there

were two elements of meaning-making: the studium, and the punctum. Studium is the cultural,

historical, and political analysis of the thing, which I align with the definition of meme forms.

There was also the punctum, the emotional connection, the thing which wounds. That is the thing

that makes “holy fucking bingle” and textposts into memes - they have that feeling of a meme,

the affective state of a meme.

Some meme objects ask to be seen as memes in different ways. Visual culture theorist

WJT Mitchell has described how images can have desires in his piece “What Do Pictures

Want?” He outlines a new location for desire in art. Most criticism or scholarship, he writes,

focuses on interpreting art, finding out what it means. The viewer or producer are the location of

UwU culture is defined more in chapter two. It is grounded in “nerd” culture, especially anime and video games.

UwU was originally an emoji popular among these subcultures in the early 2000s-2010s. It is very invested in cute

and kawaii aesthetics.

desire in these other frameworks. Mitchell shifts the location of meaning and desire from outside

of the piece of art, in creators and viewers, into the piece of art itself. These ideas align with

Gries’s, where the image itself has agency of its own. I believe both the desire within the image

and the viewer’s affective response to that perceived desire are essential components of what

makes a meme a meme. The thread is desire, specifically queer desire. So before coming to

understanding desire as it relates to queer memes, we need to come to an understanding of queer

desire and queer desire in images first.

The Queer Desiring Image

Andy Warhol’s prints act as a case study to reveal how queer art articulates desire.

Warhol, who was most active in the 1960s, was integral to the early stages of the queer art scene.

Warhol is one of the foundational pop-artists. His art exists in more complicated ways than mere

fine art/pop art binaries. Scholars have analyzed the unique nature of Warhol’s art, including its

use of poetics instead of didactics, and its investment in camp and spectacle.

In art historian

Simon Watney’s 1996 essay “Queer Andy,” he describes the charm of Warhol’s work is in its

move away from the “empowered gay” narrative, featuring only empowering portrayals of queer

individuals. Instead, Watney describes Warhol as moving toward a model of queer poetics,

which includes depictions of queer shame, in opposition to the more didactic models of queer art

available culturally in the 60s (Watney 30). Poetics is a focus on formal and semantic aspects of

artistic work and language, which usually applies to language but in this case applies to Warhol’s

art as a part of the queer cultural sphere. Didactic queer art portrays some sort of art meant to

For instance, Sasha Torres uses Warhol’s artistic bridges between camp and pop to discuss the queer aesthetics of

Batman in 1996 “The Caped Crusader of Camp: Pop, Camp, and the Batman Television Series.” Douglas Crimp

discusses camp in Warhol’s films in his 2012 book "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol, including

Warhol’s 1965 film Camp.

teach about queer life, in a way that makes that lifestyle acceptable to the mainstream. Warhol’s

poetics instead portray the aesthetic of queerness, without feeling a need to mold it into

mainstream acceptability or to teach broader audiences about queerness.

These aesthetics for Warhol include depicting both glamorous and quotidian pop-culture

items as a way of forcing the viewer to question the ways bodies and objects belong in spaces.

Matthew Tinkcom, a cultural theorist and popular media scholar, describes the formal aspects of

Warhol’s camp art through its utilization of glamour and spectacle in his 1997 article “Warhol’s

Camp.” Tinkcom notes Warhol’s work makes glamor into a spectacle as a way of exposing the

normally concealed labor of art and beauty (Tinkcom 351). These practices ask a viewer to

become aware of their body in the art space. Part of the queer experience is an awareness of the

body and its desires as being deviant. Mimicking this through aesthetic choices like the depiction

of a Campbell’s Soup can or Marilyn Monroe in bright, popping colors is a way of formally

expressing the queer experience.

So where is the desire in works of artists like Andy Warhol? While he was famous for

many kinds of art, his graphic works are perhaps the most famous of all. In 1962, Warhol

debuted his Campbell's Soup Can series. While prints of soup cans may seem an odd place to

locate desire, in many ways a “queer” or strange location may be the best place to attempt to

locate queer desire. First, the object depicted is one of mundane, quotidian life. As Muñoz points

out in Cruising Utopia, Barthes argues that “the mark of the utopian is the quotidian,” which

Muñoz argues is a way of finding utopian hope in the affective forces of everyday life, and

where queer people can glimpse their futurity (Muñoz 22-23).

One reading of these graphic works is that they express a desire to reproduce and reify

the quotidian in a fine art space, making all everyday life legible and desirable to those moving

throughout that space. Another reading is that it is an expression of longing for the mundane or

ordinary. A more appealing reading to me appears in contrast to these desires toward the

everyday. The prints express a desire for and appreciation of the mundane as fine art, but they

also desire a critique of fine art spaces. Indeed, the prints are categorized as fine art by hanging

in the space or else they would not hang there. Once they are hung, they instead desire something

of the viewer in a fine art space. The desire seems to be a pressure effect. The soup can, an object

of the pantry, something mass produced and cheap, then desires the viewer to question both it

and themselves. What is a soup can print doing in a fine art gallery? Prints mimic the mass-

produced nature of the can - print-making in comparison to painting offers the ability to rapidly

reproduce art. It does not require the brush-to-canvas contact hours of painting, though the

creation of a print screen may take similar labor.

The desire then, belongs not just to viewers or creators - as Mitchell notes, the common

formulation of desire - but is within the graphic work itself, which by existing in certain labor

and spatial terms desires a viewer to question their relation to their own labor and spatial aspects.

The way the print desires the viewer to be more aware of their own body, and of the ways their

body exists in space and in relation to quotidian and fine-art objects, is a way of forcing a similar

negotiation, like those of the bodily experiences of queer individuals. Queer bodies experience

and negotiate non-normative desire in order to be defined as queer.

Part of the queer experience is an awareness of the body and its desires as being deviant.

Mimicking this through aesthetic choices like the depiction of a Campbell’s Soup can or Marilyn

Monroe in bright, popping colors is a way of formally expressing the queer experience.

What is queer about these desires? For Warhol’s graphic works, it is queer to destabilize

the self by forcing the self to negotiate its materialist stances, making one acutely aware of the

body in space. The prints confront how the viewer’s body belongs and exists in the space, thus

forcing it into markedness, when the act of having a body for many (though not all) would

usually pass by without notice.

This desire for an awareness of the body is queer because the queer experience is so

much about the marking of the body as non-normative. For many, queerness is at its core a non-

normative desire around bodies - either bodies of others, as in same-sex sexual desire, or the

body of the self, as in some non-binary and transgender individuals. The preoccupation with

bodies throws embodiment into sharp relief, something that in a normative body might go

unmarked as just part of living. The normative body desire, that is, often goes unmarked, while

mainstream heterosexual society constantly marks the non-normative bodily desires of queer

people. The heightened awareness of a body, then, is part of the queer experience for many, and

thus becomes prominent in queer art and queer memes.

Desire within art asks us to navigate within our understanding of ourselves, and much

like Warhol’s prints, memes also contain a desire which asks the reader to negotiate within

themselves. If memes are defined by both a citation of shared cultural knowledge and the

connection of the audience to the visual/textual object, then successful memes desire and inspire

this navigation within the self.

The Queer Desiring Meme

Two examples illustrate both the average and edge-case meme to unpack what the impact

is of defining memes as objects with a desire to make a viewer negotiate within their

understanding of themselves through playful composition.

I had several questions about popular and favorite memes during my interviews with

meme creators and readers. First, a classic meme, which is the image macro form of a meme that

most audiences typically associate with the idea of memes. It is presented to us by Avery:

Abbie: Is there certain content that the meme group bonds over that everyone's like,

"Mm, that's that good gay meme content"?

Avery: Usually, it's the Lisa Simpson meme where the coffee is pouring. It'll be like,

"Respect women juice or respect trans people juice or respect NB juice or be an ally

juice." They seem to like that meme. And also when somebody posts something that they

think is particularly wholesome or that they feel like they want to encourage that type of

discourse, people will post that meme in response to like, "Yes, give me more."

What Avery references here is actually a mashup on two types of memes - the “respect juice”

meme, where the focus is usually on empowering a marginalized group by encouraging people to

drink their respect juice for that group, and the Lisa Simpson coffee cup meme. The Lisa meme

is what many would consider a classic meme, an image macro with a text overlay used to make

the outside referential portion of the meme’s joke. The textual “respect women” juice will be set

aside for this part of the analysis, as I was unable to find that combination in my searches.

similar meme, containing both the Lisa coffee image genre and the wholesome nature Avery

mentions, is the “that gay shit” meme. Here, we see Lisa Simpson having liquid poured into a

mug by someone else who is out of frame. The liquid in the container is rainbow, and is labeled

“that gay shit.” Lisa has a look of satisfaction on her face, and the label “me” on her forehead.

Figure 2: Lisa Simpson “That gay shit” meme.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme2

Specific mash up memes like this can be difficult to track down, since the visual nature of memes can make them

difficult to search for - even an image search tends to be useless, as the repetitive use of the image for thousands of

memes makes it near-impossible to find a specific iteration.

The significant thing with Lisa being poured a mug of something being a particularly

popular meme is that it is descended from homophobic memes. The original meme that is

referenced by the textual elements is the “miss me with that gay shit” meme. The first and most

well-known version of the original meme featured Squidward.

In this meme, Squidward is

dodging a thrown object labeled “miss me with that gay shit.”

Figure 3: Squidward dodging “that gay shit” meme.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme3

The homophobic implications are clear: one should avoid interacting or being hit with

that gay shit.

Queer people then reclaimed “the miss me with that gay shit” trend via image

markers of their own, usually featuring an image of someone drinking from an object labeled

“that gay shit.”

This reclamation by aesthetic force is a kind of “oppositional citation” or

“countermeme” (DeCamp, “Queer Memes as Rhetorical Scenes”; Sparby Memetic Rhetorics &

Knobel & Lankshear “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production”).

We see it here, as

well, with Lisa’s positive reaction to “that gay shit” visually turning the homophobic reference

into one that embraces queerness, and is happy and satisfied when it’s poured into a cup. In a

Squidward is a main character in the animated Nickelodeon series Spongebob Squarepants.

Some meme wikis, like Know Your Meme, crowdsource and document histories and iterations of memes like

this.

This reference is, according to Know Your Meme, descended from a 2015 vine, but references to “that gay shit”

as a phrase go back further. This includes the alleged line Chris Brown said before his 2013 assault arrest, “I'm not

down with that gay shit, I feel like boxing" and a line from a Jay-Z diss track “And since you infatuated with saying

that gay shit: (Faggot)/Bitch, you was kissing my dick when you was kissing that bitch!” The exact connection

between these earlier pop culture instances and the meme itself are unclear.

I see countermemeing and oppositional citation as closely related, and having some amount of overlap. A

countermeme will often utilize oppositional citation to accomplish “the deliberate generation of a meme that aims at

neutralizing or eradicating potentially harmful ideas” (“Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production” 223)

that Knobel and Lankshear describe, but not all oppositional citation is countermemeing.

classic image macro meme, it is easy to see the current definitions of memes working as

expected - there is both the imitative dimension and the content unit dimension. People recognize

the Lisa Simpson format, and recognize that the text will be where the joke, the personal element

will lie.

Still, even with it easily fitting the definition of a meme, that analysis misses some of the

power of that meme. It is a meme, but it does not help explain to us why it is a successful meme,

a popular meme among queer people, the kind of content people enjoy and bond over. This is

where the affective dimension becomes vital in its explanatory power. To become more

“memeish” one must achieve that affective level. That is, to engage in the rhetorical genre of a

meme at the most effective rhetorical levels and achieve peak “genre-ness” or “meme-ness”, one

must engage in the affective and social rhetorical dimensions of the genre.

Avery’s commentary can help us understand how that is functioning here, in a

straightforward presentation of a meme. It is wholesome, it encourages a discourse where respect

toward a group is encouraged. Wholesome memes are a genre of memes focused on feel-good

content, meant to lift the audience’s mood, and often to make them feel loved and supported.

As mentioned before, some of this is done via the aesthetic upending of homophobic content,

flipping hateful rhetoric into loving ones. But there is also another dimension to this. Much like

Warhol’s prints, and much like Mitchell articulates about images, memes have desires from their

reader. The desire that occurs here has to do with the ways memes cohere groups via humor.

Memes function in a rhetorical tandem between creator and audience - the imagined audience

For more on “wholesome” in online culture, see “When Did ‘Wholesome’ Become a Gen Z Compliment?” by

Sabida Hassan in the New York Times, and “The past 20 years of culture wars, explained by the word ‘wholesome’”

by Constance Grady in Vox

putting rhetorical pressure during the creation, the imagined intent and message putting pressure

on the real audience’s interpretation.

The desire of most memes is to get a positive affective reaction. In the particular case of

the Lisa meme, that is composed via a simple two letters: “Me.” In “Toward a New Rhetoric of

Difference” Stephanie Kershbaum (a guiding force for the methodology of the research I’ve

done) unpacks the ways people mark themselves as in or out of a group. Words like “we” mark a

belonging, whereas words like “they” might indicate a non-belonging. Here, Lisa has the label

“Me”, and the reader imagines a dual projection onto this - both the “me” of the creator, and the

“me” of themself. When reading a letter or book, me usually refers to the narrator - that happens

here as well, since the audience is conscious of the composed-ness and composer of the meme

object they are viewing. But memes desire something else in addition to transmitting the ideas of

the creator. They ask us to imagine the self in the position of the meme. In a novel, this might be

done rhetorically with a second-person “you.” But memes, perhaps partially because of the

nature of their remix and re-transmission, want the reader to inhabit the “me” as well.

There can be multiple reactions to a meme. Many participants mentioned if they found

the meme’s values too far in contradiction to their own, they would simply leave that meme

community entirely. Some may not initially see themselves in the “me” position and may simply

scroll on by. In both cases, the success of the meme has to do directly with the affective

connection it has to the reader. It is with this that memes can be understood in degrees - that

there are effective and ineffective memes, and that the determination is tied up in affective social

relationships between composer, object, and audience.

This may be why so many responses to a “good” meme are to repost it or to respond with “mood” or “same.” I

will go into more detail about this in the chapter on community.

This is how the affect portion of my definition applies with a standard meme - image

macro with text overlay. But it does additional work by allowing us to understand not just

degrees of success within a meme, but also fringe or edge-case memes, the type that are often

difficult to fit into current categories. I did not ask participants what they thought the definition

of a meme was, but several participants named various textposts and shitposts as their favorite

memes. An example is May, who noted that she was not sure if I would consider her favorite

meme a meme because it was a text post on twitter, We had a brief conversation with about that

idea:

May: Okay. So the meme says, "I have a girl kink, I think it's hot when women," and then

that's it. And it's a Twitter post.

Abbie: Oh, it's a Twitter post. Okay.

May: I guess that’s kind of a meme?

Abbie: Well, that's one of the things I'm really interested in figuring out is why are shit

posts also memes? Because we all know it, we're all like, "Yes, this shit post from

Tumblr or Twitter, definitely a meme." But no one can figure out why. That's something

I'm really interested in, is why are we all so sure shit posts are memes but we can't

articulate what about them is a meme, so…

May: Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely… [crosstalk] I was just saying it's a very hard thing to

categorize. Memes are a very vague space in existence.

The textpost May is referencing was made by Saphicstarlight on Twitter

, and is often

passed around in screencap form on other websites.

Figure 4: “I have a girl kink” textpost meme from Twitter.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme4

What May provides is a useful example of the kind of thing people might name as a

meme, but lacks the image-macro format.

Notably there are also iterations on other platforms, including Tumblr by user q-sil, which appeared earlier.

There is no meme image underlying the meme, though there are some vital visual

components that indicate to the reader the original provenance of the post. The screencap

features the classic formatting of twitter: which background, @handle, username, round profile

picture, time stamp, etc. Even those who do not personally use twitter would recognize via these

markers that that is where the image is from. While I will save the discussion of how platforms

put pressures on meme genres and their composition for another chapter, for now it is enough to

say that platform markers often tell readers about an imagined authorial intent. In this case,

because of twitter’s “public square” and short form nature, it is home to many short, irreverent

posts. The My Little Pony profile picture also indicates a lighthearted intent, since these usually

belong to either meme/shitposting accounts or fandom accounts, both of which frequently share

humor posts. This helps indicate to readers when a text post is meant to be taken as a meme.

What this means for the reader is that they come to expect a certain rhetorical mode

centered around playful composition, and these image markers from social media help the reader

mentally frame the text as playful. But despite these image markers, this does not share the

“content unit” that image macro memes do. Nor is it iterative. So what differentiates this post

from a mere viral internet object? This is where the affective dimension of the desiring meme

becomes most useful. This meme, like the Lisa Simpson meme, asks the reader to inhabit the

first-person rhetorical position. Once again the reader is asked to imagine both the author as the

“I” --- and themselves. They are asked to do this within certain spaces, places, and affective

dimensions. In this case, seeing this on a twitter timeline or in screencap form would indicate

that both it and the reader are inhabiting a certain internet space. A twitter timeline is self-

curated, so to see this one would have to be following the account (or following someone who

liked it) or that the tweet had gone viral and would appear under the “popular tweets” heading.

Either way, it would appear almost always as part of a self- or algorithmically-curated reading

experience. Like how someone reading a joke book knows to expect jokes and punchlines, a

reader in this space expects meme text posts as a possibility. In screencap form in Facebook

groups or on Reddit, the same principle applies.

So why does this ask the reader to inhabit the “I” here? It has to do with the social nature

of the meme genre. Memes desire to propagate themselves, to be passed around. But they do not

merely ask to be passed around, the way viral objects do. Imagine the movie montage of an

internet object going viral - perhaps it shows the like count on a YouTube video skyrocketing, or

merchandise being produced and sold. But consumption of an object, liking it, even adoring it, is

a different rhetorical mode for an audience than inhabiting it. The Warhol prints can help guide

this interpretation. The print in the museum space asks the reader to become aware of their own

body in relation to the world around them. So too does this meme ask the reader to become

aware of their body - in fact, it seems to desire the reader noticing their desiring. The reader of

the meme becomes the “I” that thinks it is “hot when women,” and in the moment that the viewer

connects rhetorically to that “I,” it highlights that desire. While the Warhol prints use the

affordances of being a physical object in a given space to bring forward that awareness of desire,

the meme use the affordances of language. It is worth delving into the visual culture and rhetoric

of queer desire to fully unpack how this image is asking for the reader to inhabit the “I” of the

meme.

I turn to interviewee May to explain how this meme wants to make marked the queer

body and its desires. When asked what was funny about the meme, May responded: “So, I think

it's funny because I guess first of all it's saying that liking girls is, it's usually a kink of

something, like, specific and this is just like, ‘Yes girls.’ And then it just stops the sentence

because I think it's hot when women and that's it.” What May is getting at here is that in

heteronormative society when kinks and women are discussed, there is usually something

specific being talked about - an act or a body part that the man finds desirable for women to do

or have. May phrases this as “it's usually a kink of something, like, specific.” Instead, the post as

she notes subverts the expectation of heteronormative specificity. Instead, it asks the reader to

just find it hot for women to exist and move through the world - as May says “this is just like,

‘Yes girls.’”. This alternative to heteronormative society isn’t funny to be laughed at, however.

The laughter is at the unexpected subversion of both language and desire - a bit of delight in

discovering that what one thought would be heteronormative is instead queer! It is in that

laughter that the identification comes with the “I,” since for this to really resonate deeply the

reader must have that queer delight in the first place. This is the difference between the

consumption of a viral object and the inhabiting of the memetic affective space. This object

becomes a meme, and inhabits the meme genre, not because it takes the traditional form of an

image with text, but instead because it desires for the reader to become aware of their own

queerness and queer desires and thus inhabit a moment of queer delight, surprise, laughter.

It is the moment of enjoyment that encapsulates a certain understanding of queerness as

different from other methods of upending the social order. In Lee Edelman’s Bad Education, he

notes that while queerness is often deployed as a positive identity, that is an identity with

meaning, knowledge, values, he views queerness instead as a void. Queerness in his view is not

about positive didactic representations, but instead about disruption. It is a void which disrupts

social order and understanding. The excess of enjoyment is one of those disruptions to

understanding. Edelman writes “Queerness, similarly, refuses limitation to particular persons,

objects, or acts. Associated with the power of a drive that subdues the subject’s will or agency

and invoking an enjoyment in excess of the pleasures associated with the good, queerness figures

meaning’s collapse and the encounter with ab-sens” (20). Enjoyment and pleasure in excess, and

the inability to easily (or at all) make clear meaning of this pleasure upends the social order. This

constant move toward the void of excess pleasure helps define the queerness of memes.

That moment of ab-sens, which Edelman also refers to also as jouissance, is what creates

the space and place for the “I think it’s hot when” text post to be a meme - even if that state is

not necessarily permanent.

Some internet objects may fall in and out of the meme space as the

ability for the reader to inhabit the rhetorical space of the first-person shift, and different

audiences may shift whether something is a meme or not as well. Importantly, the meme-ness is

determined by a combination of imitative dimensions and content units, as discussed by

Shifman, as well as an interaction between real and imagined readers and audiences and their

own perceptions and feelings as they read and compose. Memes are as much a mode of reading

as they are formal features - but it is these formal features in the text and visuality that attune us

to the mode of reading, consuming, and inhabiting the object desires.

As I move into the next chapter, I will analyze further the ways this web of personal,

social, and formal aspects come together to create communities, and what memes do for queer

online communities and their participants. First, I will turn to the practice of reading as a queer

community literacy act, and how reading functions for the queer community in the digital age.

Then, I will look at the ways race and queerness intertwine to create - and sometimes evacuate -

meaning from these community literacy practices. Finally, I will look at the ways platforms and

communities shape each other as they shape the production of queer memes.

Edelman is using jouissance in the Lacanian sense here. The terms also has significant history among French

feminists, especially Helene Cixous.

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Interlude

<speaker id="Abbie"> My final question is always, is there anything you want me as a

researcher to know about how you feel about memes, your relationship with memes, how you

use memes that you didn't get to say during the rest of the interview? </speaker>

I found the meme I made that people liked.

</speaker>

<speaker id="Abbie"> Please tell me about it.</speaker>

It was one that I literally had to go look for the picture because I knew exactly what I wanted. It's

me refreshing my email five minutes after sending my supervisor a new type of draft and it's

hard, too close to the camera, and it says, " I showed you my garbage please respond." My

garbage I think it was, I showed you my something, please respond and I crossed it out really

badly on purpose. It got 940 likes and I was really proud of myself.

</meme></literacy></speaker>

<speaker id="Abbie"> The serotonin hit from that must have been this huge.</speaker>

I know, right? It was so funny because I was literally doing it and I was like, "I know who can

relate to this." It's that whole draft and I was like, "Refresh refresh. What do you think?" And I’m

like, "This spreadsheet looks like... What am I doing? Your other question, what's important? I

think it's really important, how rich with meaning these memes are. It blows my mind how many

layers of cultural awareness or cultural reference you have to understand to understand a meme.

They're a language. It's so incredibly cool and that meme isn't even a complicated one. But it's

funny because the cat looks desperate or whatever but it's also funny because it's calling its own

work garbage. What's really funny about it is that it's making fun of, "I showed you my penis,

please respond.” Thing that boys would do on online dating stuff. If you understand that part is

funnier because they're looking at the camera like, "Hello, show you my... [inaudible 00:49:26]

on Snapchat please respond." Even just for a stupid little meme, you have to understand three

different things to know why it's funny. Otherwise, it's just like a cat thing. Please respond to my

email, which isn’t that funny. The good ones are even more than that, the layers. I think that

people often dismiss things that are humor based like that. and also that are internet based and

that are youth based and it's all of those things. I think that as a sociologist and symbolic

interactionist and qualitative lover, I wished I could take a course on memes. The depths of them

is so funny and so interesting and it says so much about human nature and collective creativity

and like collective meaning. I just think it's really cool.

</sharedHumor></meme></literacy></speaker>

Chapter 2: Reading is What? Fundamental

On Reading and Queer Meme Literacies

In the first chapter I spent time analyzing what memes are, both socially and formally. As

Shifman notes, this is a core question when discussing memes. But what things are can never

really be separated from what they do, especially when it comes to language. With this in mind, I

want to turn in this chapter to how memes function as community literacy practices for queer

people.

The data around community writing and literacy for this project felt almost

overwhelmingly rich. I will focus on a few specific areas that contribute to academic discussions

on computers, composition, community literacy, and pop culture. First, I will explore the social

and community bonds queer people are forming through the reading and writing practices of

memes. With this, I will also explore the various ways the “community” in community literacy

can be defined and thought through. Next, I will explore the specific reading and writing

practices participants described in the interviews, to give an on-the-ground look at community

literacy practices in action and the ways participants describe and view their own literacy.

Finally, I will explore the connections between circulation and community literacy, tying

together the conversations about algorithmic influence and circulation with the conversations

about literacy and writing practices in a way that helps clarify digital community writing more

deeply.

I will explore the social and community bonds queer people are forming through the

reading and writing practices of memes through three cases. First, that of the content creator,

who is actively involved in making memes for groups. Second, that of the forager, who may

repost content from elsewhere, and who brings content from outside into smaller, more intimate

communities. They may not conceptualize themselves as a creator but may occasionally make

memes under the right conditions. And finally, that of the lurker, who may interact with meme

groups but might never produce content, and may circulate it rarely or not at all. I will explore

the different conceptual strands of community.

Many scholars, like Limor Shifman, have begun definitions of memes that separate them

from mere virality. Shifman, as well as scholars like Laurie Gries, discuss the ways memes

morph over time, and their unique habits of circulation. They analyze how memes have lives and

wills of their own, independent of their composers. Much of the conversation on memes focuses

either on circulation and virality as a large-scale phenomenon, or on overtly political uses of

memes, like the use of memes by leftist groups to promote leftist politics.

Indeed, both of these

are important to how we understand memes and will help feed into and build my own theories.

Gries and Shifman, however, most appeal to me for how they understand memes as actors

themselves within actor-networks.

I would like to add to this conversation a greater focus on how these objects function

socially in queer groups. Wide-scale observations of circulation behavior may be eliding the

specific community literacy functions these memes have - the ways they help cohere and define

communities, something that adds usefully to the current conversation about memes. I will unite

conversations on circulation with conversations on the makers and readers of memes to better

understand the connection between those practicing a community literacy, and the ways those

objects function socially in their circulation though groups. That is, I want to unite Gries’ and

Shifman’s interests. Memes are agentive objects with their own desires and circulations, and that

An example of this would be pages like “Elle Woods-Core & the Delta Nuniverse” where stills from the movie

Legally Blonde are used to advocate for communist interests.

agentive nature is attached to the social function that they have with the people who make, read,

and recirculate them.

The title of this chapter is a reference to RuPaul’s Drag Race, one of the most popular

and mainstream pieces of queer media currently on TV. The show, which features several

challenges, includes a small one on “reading,” a queer practice with a long history rooted in the

queer, primarily black and latinx space of ballroom and drag culture, as in Paris is Burning,

which RuPaul mentions specifically when introducing the segment.

To win the challenge the

queen must give the best read and throw the best shade, and thus gain an advantage for a later

challenge. These acts are not coincidentally aligned with the reading that scholars associate with

literacy. In order to “read” and throw shade, one must have a thorough understanding of the

composition practices around throwing shade and, of course, be able to literally read the people

they are throwing shade at.

Scholars of Black queer theory have discussed reading and shade as literacy practices. In

their chapter “Black Data,” in the edited collection No Tea, No Shade, Shaka McGlotten talks

about black queer reading as a practice, using Obama’s facial expression as an example. They

write, “But Obama’s grimacing mask is not merely a sign to be decoded, a truth to be unveiled.

A read is a punctum that is also always an invitation, a salvo in a call--and--response” (268).

This understanding of reading is vital to understanding queer literacy in a few ways. To read in

In chapter three I will unpack more about the ways that white queer culture usurps and appropriate the language

of these types of spaces.

RuPaul is likely also aware of the Reading is Fundamental public service announcement that would have been

circulating in the 70s, and riffing off of it.

McGlotten is referring to Barthes’ punctum here. Barthes writes in Camera Lucida that “A photograph’s punctum

is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”. He also refers to it as often being

embedded in a detail. I interpret McGlotten here as calling the read that detail which pricks, and by pricking, invites

response.

the history of Black queerness is to understand reading as a practice of invitation, a crucial part

of the practice of composition.

Seth Davis’s work focuses on this reading and shade-throwing as an integral black queer

literacy practice. Specifically, in his article “Shade: Literacy Narratives at Black Gay Pride” he

states that shade is “Informed by an oppositional consciousness, it is a multilayered way of

communicating that is situated in the Black queer community” (56). He also writes that “These

[hashtags like #SayHerName] also inspire my understanding of ‘fierce literacies’—that is, a type

of counter consciousness that allows Black queer people or ‘the girls’ to riff off of static ideas of

language and literacy both to communicate with and to create community amongst friends.

Shade invites the listener to engage alternative or queer readings of the world in general and

dubious statements in particular” (58). Davis also notes that he, building of Eric Darnell

Pritchard’s work, see it as necessary to take this expansive, multimodal view of literacy, writing

that “When I use the term literacy, I am riffing off of Eric Darnell Pritchard’s research along

with other researchers who define literacy as a sociocultural communicative practice of meaning

making that is not confined to words alone” (56). It is worth highlighting here that reading and

shade are both practices rooted in Black queerness. While many non-Black members of the queer

community utilize the practice, the foundation cannot be extricated from Black queerness and

from Black women, a group Davis refers to together as “the girls” to highlight the ways they are

intertwined in their practices.

All this to say, there is a long history of reading being fundamental to queer humor, and

queer reading is understood as a practice of engagement with others. It is expansive and not

limited to reading of text, but also includes many visual signifiers like the body. While

I discuss Davis’s conception of ”the girls” more deeply in the third chapter, but here it is just useful to note that

Black women and Black queer people share some amount of community literacy practices.

composition is vital to literacy, so is reading. Many of the community members participated in

the community exclusively through acts of reading literacy, and even those who created their

own meme content read much more often than they composed. It seems obvious in some ways-

most people read more text than they write. However, it highlighted some important nuances to

what memes do in the queer community. For instance, in conversation with several participants,

they revealed that while they do not compose with memes, they still use them to interact with

queer community members. Audrey highlights this when they talk about sending on memes

they’ve read:

Abbie: What is your interaction with memes?

Audrey: I will read them and like them pretty consistently. I will save them. I will share

them with friends on my story. I don't usually comment, and I don't make my own or

remix them really ever.

Abbie: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit more about sharing with friends? So what does

that process look like?

Audrey: If I will come across a piece of content and I will find it either humorous, or

insightful, or meaningful in some way and it will remind me, usually I have someone that

I know, and so I'll send that to them. And say that, "I saw this thought of you." A lot of

times I don't put context because we know each other well enough that I can just send it

and they'll know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

This is a particularly intriguing literacy act. Audrey had not actually composed the meme,

so sharing it was not writing it. And while reading as a literacy act was a precursor to sharing,

sharing itself is not quite the same as reading. The act of sharing a meme encompassed a gray

space of a literacy event. I have often done this same act, and many other participants described

doing the same. You see a particularly funny meme in a larger community space and the impulse

is to then bring it to a smaller community space like a groupchat or to other individual friends.

This sharing is almost an act of foraging, to take the tastiest bits of what one likes out in

the content-based communities and bring them home to our friendship-based communities to

share together. Here I borrow an understanding of community from sociology to better

understand these literacy activities. Hanne Collins et al. unpack the purpose of a variety of

“social ties” in their article “Relational diversity in social portfolios predicts well-being.” Social

ties in sociology is a well-established way of differentiating between, for instance, close friends

versus the people you happen to share space or interests with. Collins et al. especially note that a

variety of kinds of social ties are vital to a person’s well-being. What these participants report

with their own meme “foraging” reflects the way these strong and weak social ties link to their

literacy practices. Weak social ties, like meme groups, often provide content that users then share

with their strong social ties to help reinforce their bond. But as Collins et al’s study reveals, it is

not that one form of community is better than the other - both strong ties communities (like a

best friend group chat) and a weak ties community (like a queer meme group that you lurk on)

are both important to the community member’s well-being overall.

Community literacy

practices around memes change across different digital spaces and across different kinds of

community social ties.

I have written before about the entanglement between publics and communities, and I

continue to think unpacking these terms can give us new insights into how literacy functions in

various social spaces (DeCamp and Cushman). And to understand how queer literacy is

functioning socially, reading is what? Fundamental!

When I write that reading is fundamental, what I mean here is that reading, writing,

reposting, and reacting all appear in various forms - and that everyone participates in reading

even if they do not participate in other actions. I mentioned before that many “forage” in large

groups and bring content into other more immediate friend groups. This literacy action - reading,

This idea of the importance of weak social ties has become especially prominent since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent press has included outlets like Paula Span’s recent New York Times piece “They May Be Just Acquaintances.

They’re Important to You Anyway.” Some, but not all, of the interviews for this project took place after the

COVID-19 shut downs, where internet social ties came into sharp focus for many.

intaking, and passing on to another group - makes clear the ways memes travel in different ways

through different types of communities. Each community, depending on the platform, the

members, and the individual personality of the person reading, facilitates literacy differently.

That is, like hives of honeybees or networks of fungi, community writing is rhizomatic, a

constantly growing multiplicity between individuals experiencing literacy events and the many

kinds of bonds they forge over time through their literate actions.

The rhizome has been a common metaphor for queer understandings of the relationship

between the self and others. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari define a rhizomatic

way of thinking, one centered around ruptures and multiplicities. Jafari S. Allen builds on this

concept in “Black/Queer Rhizomatics,” writing that “The Black/queer rhizome is generative, as

it inspires connection beyond a staid, linear genealogy; it rejects old teleologies of

heteronormative natu-ral “pro-gress” from a single root or (-family) tree.” (29). Jaqueline Rhodes

and Jonathan Alexander write about the queer rhizome in Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing

the Self. Rhodes in particular writes on rhizomes and asks, “That is, how do we deal with the

difference within? The move toward the One is a narrative of inclusion, the type that seeks to

contain difference in order to make it legible, identifiable, and thus acceptable to a normative

readership—in this case, ourselves. I would argue, however, that in our radical alterity we are at

times unknowable to ourselves—and that it is within this incommensurability and unknowability

that we find fruitful places to resist.” For Rhodes, part of queer writing is this rhizomatic

understanding - one where queer people are constantly writing to better know an ultimately

unknowable self - and yet, we write all the same, and in this struggle queer people can resist the

larger power structures they find themselves within. I use rhizome as a metaphor here and

throughout this dissertation as part of this lineage. Queer memes and the writing processes

around them are slippery and at times difficult to articulate because as Rhodes notes, the queer

self is at times unknowable even to that queer self - and this unknowability is first, part and

parcel of queerness (and thus queer writing) and second, fruitful to queer resistance. It is in the

messy untraceability, the cheekiness, the many readers and writers and gray areas between them

that the meme rhizome may be useful for queer resistance to cisheteropatriarchal structures.

Case 1: Adara

Background

Adara is a white, queer, nonbinary 28 year old. They are part of the minority of people

interviewed who felt they made meme content of their own regularly. (It is worth noting some

people who made meme content qualified it as being a rare occurrence or that they didn’t

consider themselves meme makers even when they did make content.) Adara helps illustrate the

“how” and “why” of meme content making, which helps keep meme communities moving.

Adara was one of the participants who felt they were “fully out” - that is, open about their

sex and gender identities. They did mention being “less out” as genderqueer with family, as they

“just know it would be something that they wouldn't fully understand. It would cause me more

annoyance than anything else.” Being fully out transferred to online spaces as well. In fact,

Adara mentioned being more confident online than offline. This online/offline queer persona was

evident across many levels of “being out” among participants, and whether fully closeted or fully

out, most participants expressed that there was a feeling of freedom to participating in online

spaces.

Memes can also reinforce those structures - but as Deleuze and Guattari note, even the worst part of the rhizome

is still part of and vital to the rhizome.

As a meme creator, Adara primarily used instagram. They expressed that this was both a

result of the interface as well as the politics of the space. Instagram is a primarily visual

platform, focusing on images over text. As a self-described visual learner, this aligned well with

Adara’s preferred modes of composition. Though both platforms are owned by Meta, Adara

expressed that instagram felt safest to them, while facebook and twitter left progressives like

themselves open to targeted attacks from the alt-right. Instagram did not align perfectly with

their ideals, in particular for their suppression of sex workers, but it was the best of the social

media platforms for them.

Adara as Meme-Maker

As mentioned above, Adara’s behavior as a meme maker can help elucidate the “how”

and “why” of meme making in queer communities. When asked what the creation process

looked like for them, they responded:

I think when I make memes, sometimes I'll think of a popular image that's going around

or a popular meme and do my own thing with it. Other times, I'll be like, "Oh, I

remember this cartoon from my childhood, and this picture is ridiculous, and so I'm going

to caption it." So in terms of a popular meme ... And this is what a lot of the gay memes

do, I think. They will use a popular meme to fuck with it and add a particularly queer

element.

So I did the one with the guy from Despicable Me with him holding the gun, and it says,

"Oh, so you're a gay? Name every drag queen," just to be the ways where people assume

that gay people, gay men in particular, are in love with drag and only watch RuPaul's

Drag Race and that's a point of reference to identify people. So I think, with me, I use

popular forms to incorporate queer themes in a way that I think a lot of ... And I've gotten

people that tell me, "That's really funny and I totally relate to that," so yeah.

When Adara describes this meme, they mention “the guy from Despicable Me” - this

would be Gru, from the franchise Despicable Me, a popular children’s movie. Adara is

describing the “Gru with a gun” meme format. This image features Gru holding a gun. The gun

gives a bit of menace to the image, since the gun is facing the viewer of the meme. The gun in

this meme format is clearly photoshopped in, featuring regular human hands instead of Gru’s.

Gru has a blank, dead smile, adding to the menace of the photo. The use of a comedic childhood

movie character contrasts with the menacing elements, making this a format popular for a funny

threat type memes - as we see Adara describe.

Figure 5: Gru with a Gun meme format background.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme5

Adara here expresses that memes are conceptualized partially through the absurd - what

they explain as the use of ridiculous images or of “fuck[ing] with it.” On one hand, this is a form

of self-expression. We see Adara utilizing a meme to express their frustration with stereotypes of

queerness, including loving drag. This meme phrase - “name every x” is a common gatekeeping

phrase for hobbies, often weaponized against marginalized people in those hobby spaces. For

instance, a woman with a band T-shirt may be told she’s only wearing the shirt for men’s

attention and does not actually listen to the band. If she protests, she’ll be asked obscure trivia to

“prove” she listens to them - here exaggerated as “name every x!” This phrase has evolved into

its own meme, often to mock the misogyny of people gatekeeping hobbies. Adara, then, is

utilizing a visual meme format alongside the textual one to express their feelings around cultural

expectations of queerness - as if queer people are required to participate in certain pop culture

elements of queerness in order to actually be queer. Though the original phrase is about hobby

gatekeeping, the underlying frustration is the same - that someone is attempting to gatekeep them

from a thing they enjoy, and imply they are only doing it for attention. In this case, it packs an

extra punch because the gatekeeping is around an identity category, not a hobby.

Adara ends this particular description of meme making by saying that they get feedback

from others about relating to their memes. That is the other hand to Adara’s use of memes as

self-expression for their frustrations around cultural expectations of queerness. While they are a

form of self-expression, they are also a way of connecting to other community members. It’s

worth noting that Adara goes beyond the ability to make something funny - instead, they

highlight that others find their work funny and relatable. We see here the point of exigence for

Adara to participate as a writer/composer in the queer meme community. Later, when asked

about what their composing process looks like, they responded:

So I have a few ways of doing it. Sometimes, I debate whether or not to put it on my

story or to put it directly on my Instagram. Usually, I just think of the image first, like I'll

think of an image and I'll be like, "Oh, that would be funny if that was a meme," and

caption it because I kind of think that anyway. <redacted/> jokingly says I think in

memes anyway. She'll say something and I'll make a joke, it'll be like, "Oh yeah, it's like

in that episode of this." It was like, "Yeah, that's a meme." So usually I'll think of an

image first and then think of a caption. I'll either go onto Meme Generator and try to

make that caption, or I'll go to my Instagram story and then just use the word art on there

and put it on top of the image, and I might save it so that I can just post it or I'll just add it

to my story.

This is a more in-depth view into the literacy event of meme making. While the above anecdote

uses an already-existing meme image as its base, Adara mentions here thinking of an image and

deciding to make it a meme - to imbue it with the meme-ness discussed in chapter 1. Still, we see

the same attachment of meme images to pop-culture touchstones, likely a way of reaching the

goal of something being both funny and relatable by referencing shared cultural knowledge that

breeds a sense of belonging. Adara conceptualizes the meme first, and most notably states that

they “think in memes anyway,” reinforcing the idea that memes are not just a set of formal

characteristics but instead a way of conceptualizing compositions. They use several platforms to

achieve the desired end composition, an idea I will revisit in chapter four.

In short, Adara reveals in these two snippets some important facets of how they compose

memes. First, they compose queerly by pushing back against heteronormative culture with word

and image. Second, they utilize shared cultural knowledge to be both funny and relatable in order

to better connect to the queer community they are composing within. And third, that they use a

variety of tools and platforms to accomplish this act of composition. This gives insight into how

a meme comes into being: a moment of exigence that sparks the process, and the navigation from

that first image in the mind to the final posted product sent out into the queer meme community.

When Adara describes their process, they say that “I think when I make memes, sometimes I'll

think of a popular image that's going around or a popular meme and do my own thing with it.

Other times, I'll be like, "Oh, I remember this cartoon from my childhood, and this picture is

ridiculous, and so I'm going to caption it.” Before they compose, they “see” the image of the

meme, and those images they build memes off of are available from acts of reading – to have

consumed the cultural content and seen the popular memes is to have participated in numerous

reading acts over time. It is from this base of reading that composition becomes possible.

But why is Adara making these memes? How does one come to think in memes? When

asked what got them into meme culture, they responded:

That is a good question. Growing up ... So with my friend <redacted/>, <redacted/>’s a

big Internet person and likes the most ridiculous things and finds the most obscure

references, and so she's gotten me into that Internet sense of humor. I think part of what

made me interested in doing it is that's my sense of humor, the kind of dark, kind of

random, ADHD, spastic sense of humor. I feel like that's a lot of what it was like being

raised as a '90s kid, too, because all the cartoons and media that we took in were crazy

and queer in a lot of ways and sporadic. So I think what made me want to make memes

was that, like the ridiculousness of it. I think another thing, too, was I consider myself a

politically-minded person but often, I feel like the best ways to engage in those

conversations is through humor. So I think that's what part of me wanted to do, too.

Also, I saw with the rise of alt-right and just the rise of conservative politics throughout

2014 on, I would say, it wasn't 2016 like most people assume, is that they were using the

same platforms that alternative people were using and trying to make it their own. So I

think, often, it initially started out as a response to trolls, and then I just had fun with it.

There are a few facets of Adara’s life that motivate them here. Some are interior, self-motivated

reasons, like their personal sense of humor. There are also several external factors - a friend’s

influence, political interest, and the social and political climate they live within. This highlights

nicely the interconnected web of community and self that is so vital to really understanding how

memes function as a community literacy practice. There is no single motivating factor, no single

exigence. Rather, it is a living network of communities and selves weaving together within an

individual writer that produces memes - and these memes then circulate among various

communities and selves to influence both individual readers and their communities.

Consider, for instance, if Adara was less interested in composing in opposition to

conservative and alt-right trolls, or did not develop their sense of humor in the way they did. The

memes they made might circulate in different ways and spheres, influencing the communities

around them in different ways. Scholars like Laurie Gries have outlined the ways items circulate

on the internet, writing that

Rhetoric is a distributed act that emerges from between these affective encounters and

interactions, not among individual discrete elements (author, text, audience) in any given

rhetorical situation. In this theoretical sense, rhetoric is a ‘process of distributed

emergence and . . . an ongoing circulation process’ whose circulatory range is affected by

the social flux of forces, energies, encounters, and so forth (13). The notion of rhetorical

ecologies is productive for visual rhetoric, then, because it challenges us to imagine how

images emerge and flow within a network (or field) of forces, affects, and associations

(Still Life with Rhetoric 25)

Adara, then, acts as a small but vital part of the circulation, whose personality and interactions

with memes constitutes and has some part in the larger ecosystem of queer memes.

And of course, several participants found their personal interactions with the community

literacy practices of memes different from Adara’s. I want to turn now to a second case, that of

Lilly, who rarely made memes but did frequently recirculate them.

Case 2: Lilly

Background

Lilly is a white transgender 24 year old woman. She was completely out to all family,

coworkers, and on the internet. She, in contrast to Adara, interacted with a variety of platforms

for her meme usage and to connect to the queer community. She described using Discord to

communicate with various members of her polyamorous relationship, using reddit and 4Chan to

intake meme content, and Facebook to connect via memes with other queer people going through

graduate school.

Lilly participates in that peculiar literacy event I described above - she mentions rarely

making them, but does not purely intake them either. Instead, she collects them from various

sources, redistributing them across various communities. This social act of redistribution was

incredibly common, and was performed by the vast majority of people I interviewed. In fact,

next to reading memes, it was the most common literacy act involving memes. She also had a

taste for a type of meme content called a “shitpost.” Shitposts are often purposefully bad or

strange - Lilly described them as “a reverse joke, an anti-joke… intentional badness.” Also in

contrast with Adara, she avoided some amount of political memes, since she found them stressful

during an activity she usually used to unwind.

When Lilly did make memes, she was unusual compared to other participants in her tool

choices. While many others used meme generators on their browsers, or did editing through

phone apps, she instead used Paint and PowerPoint. She ascribed this behavior to her background

as a scientist, where PowerPoint is frequently used for image generation and editing.

Lilly as a meme distributor

We see with Lilly an array of differences from Adara’s case. Both have significant

investments in the literacy events involving memes: reading them, creating them, using them to

communicate with friends and loved ones. However, the behaviors they choose to specifically

use manifest in different ways based on the social and cultural spheres they are part of. It also

depends on what they as individuals enjoy and find comfortable. This experience of fun and

enjoyment is something I think is vital to meme making as a queer community literacy practice

and could be useful to community literacy as a field to flesh out more fully.

Much of the work currently done in composition studies focuses on utilitarian writing, in

contrast to Lilly’s writing for fun. For instance, school writing is done, at least on some level,

because one must in order to get through the process of schooling. Public writing has a variety of

purposes - Linda Flower, for instance, outlines a case where an aspiring rapper uses rap as public

writing to address the use of suspension in school as an unfair punishment (Community Literacy

and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement) while Elenore Long outlines how local publics pop in

and out of existence via composition practices in the community of Trackton, among others, to

do a variety of kinds of social and socializing work (Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of

Local Publics). Some of these kinds of writing are emotionally motivated, but they still serve a

defined purpose for the writer. The writers are seeking an outcome via their writing, often a

material change to the world around them. In queer community literacies, scholars like Eric

Darnell Pritchard outline types of writing and literacy done for survival by black queer people

among white, cisgender, heteronormative pressures, as well as restorative literacies. Pritchard

outlines the role affect and emotion can have in literacy practices, noting that some of their study

participants, like Christopher Mallard-Scott, participated in acts of “literacy self-suppression”

from fear, and noting that different spaces allowed different literacy practices because of how

they contributed to feelings of safety (Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of

Literacy 60-63, 75-78). What Pritchard notes here is that affect and emotion can be vital to

community literacy practices. Lilly’s meme use can help community literacy better understand

the connection between the affective experiences of reading and writing and the idea of writing

for fun and enjoyment, without having a set outcome envisioned by the writer beyond sharing

community literacy acts with others.

Memes illustrate the ways emotion and writing for fun as an aspect of community

connection are vital to understanding queer community literacy more widely. Memes are rarely a

“necessary” form of writing. Schools rarely teach them as part of the curriculum. They are still

an uncommon way for writers to communicate to the public, even if they gain more popularity

for this purpose as time goes on. Most memes made, read, and circulated by queer meme creators

like Lilly are for enjoyment. They convey no needed information, they do not make an

immediate material difference to her life. But they do make her feel something, and well it is a

more abstract reason to learn and participate in this community literacy, it constitutes a large part

of the literacy events people like Lilly experience in their day to day lives. It is useful to tie ideas

like Pritchard’s, which think about the role of feelings in community literacy practices, with

Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Gellar, and Neal Lerner’s recent work on the Meaningful Writing

Project. This project found that in a school setting, meaning making for the writer was an under-

used and valuable metric for writing (The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching and

Writing in Higher Education). Essentially, some community literacy practices can be better

understood if we factor in the ways those practices make people feel, and the personal and inter-

personal meaning they gain from the various interactions those literacy events precipitate.

This helps illuminate why different literacy events have different meanings for different

people - and why some, like Lilly, would rather use redistributing memes as a form of

community literacy instead of making new content from scratch. I asked Lilly what her

interaction with memes looks like when she is sending them on to friends. She replied,

I am in a polyamorous relationship with three or four other trans women, and we've all

created a small server of just us, and we post things to that group for all of us to see, talk.

And I also directly message friends who would appreciate things. And my now-current

main Discord server has a channel in it devoted to memes, and I get a lot of stuff from

there, and post a lot of stuff to there, repost, that I find on Facebook or other places on

Discord…

And when asked what makes her want to start that process, she replied “If it reminds me of that

person, or if it's about a game or a piece of content I know they have experienced… Or if it's

something that we've talked about prior. I don't know.” A few aspects of the social, cultural, and

personal at play here come together to make any given redistribution of a meme as a literacy

event happen. First, for any redistribution, reading has to occur. In Lilly’s case, that happens

within these larger memes groups where she regularly consumes content that she has curated to

match her own interests. From there, she must decode according to the smaller group literacies

what memes will resonate among her friends. For instance, one might find a funny meme in a

general gay meme group - and while funny, know it will not resonate with the smaller, more

specific ways of communicating that her more direct relationships use. A meme about a game

they do not all play, or using a format that she might know they are less familiar with, for

example. It is only when, in this larger array of memes, she can identify one that hits the

meaningful core of her group’s literacy - shared media, experiences, aesthetics - that she will

reshare the content. While she did not compose the meme, she did have a literacy event in

reading it to decode whether it was appropriate for re-appropriation.

There is also the reposting itself. It is not quite writing, but it is a common composition

behavior, and motivated by the social bonds I described above. In many ways, it resembles

writing. After all, a piece of multimodal composition using alphanumeric language is being

passed from one person to another to communicate between the two of them. The meme is meant

to communicate some sort of shared feeling, shared bond, shared laughter - though the sharing of

the meme itself is complicated as a literacy event. On the other, receiving end, there is then again

the literate act of reading to finish out the interaction.

As a queer community literacy practice, this is not just common, but vital. Lilly describes

acts of reading and writing as an escape for her from the systemic oppression and

marginalization she faces as a trans woman. She also describes them as a way of connecting with

the queer relationships in her life. Like many people in queer meme groups, Lilly is not just part

of the queer community (itself a fraught concept) but many queer communities, from large

general meme groups where queer people make jokes and blow off steam, to small group chats

where the memes are shared as a sort of shorthand for emphasizing the things the group shares

and finds funny. After all, shared humor, as I discuss in my first chapter, is a way many kinds of

groups and communities cohere themselves, cementing values, shared lexicons, common culture,

etc. It is the variety of communities that facilitates the variety of interactions with memes, as

well. Not only did many participants, including Lilly, say that meme sharing was a way of

sharing humor with close friends, but many, as I will show in more depth the next case, also find

the access it allows to broader communities to be a valuable way to connect with other queer

people when they are otherwise isolated from them.

What Lilly really helps illustrate here is that queer meme communities are highly

ecological and rhizomatic. They serve a variety of purposes, and discerning the purpose of a

queer meme community and the literacy it uses means taking this more rhizomatic view, as

discussed earlier. Individual literate agents are deeply connected in various ways to those around

them - together they make up the whole of the rhizomatic plant, but they might serve different

purposes. Some may live in the roots, some may be the grass above ground. But the rhizome

cannot survive without this variety of actors, and no part is more important than the other for the

health of a rhizomatic community. The reading and passing around of memes is just as

productive for the queer meme community as producing them. The individual agents and their

literate acts become rhizomes, all connected, of various shapes and sizes, and it is these many

interconnected rhizomatic queer communities that shore up those individual agents against

systemic oppressions. After all, if you are part of a thriving rhizome, you are never alone, and

there is real social and material support to be found by being among those who understand you.

Distributors, in many ways, act as the connections between different elements of the rhizomes,

bringing different queer communities into connection by redistributing their memes.

Lilly also gives some insight into the particular sub-communities she is a part of, and this

window into the idiosyncrasies of sub-communities can highlight the ways queer community

literacies grow and change based on their shared cultures. A common discussion and complaint

with interviewees was that the largest and most popular meme groups and pages catered to the

cis white gay male experiences of queerness. While many still find these memes generally funny

and might circulate them, it was common for the interviewees to then join smaller, more niche

groups that reflected their experiences more accurately. This spanned everything from accounts

focused on lesbian memes to sapphic Asian meme pages. In Lilly’s case, she participated in

several trans meme pages and groups, as well as perhaps one of the most controversial meme

sites discussed in any interview - the infamous 4chan.

Scholar Derek Sparby elaborates on the

memetic rhetorics of 4chan and the way these are wrapped up in significant and damaging digital

aggression, writing that “anti-PC practices also reveal some key outsider aspects of /b/’s

collective identity: it is based in performances of misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic,

and ableist behaviors” (“Digital Social Media and Aggression: Memetic Rhetoric in 4chan’s

Collective Identity” 89). Sparby also highlights that trans women are a particularly targeted

group.

Lilly’s interactions with such a controversial site highlight a lot about how different queer

literate agents experience queerness on the internet - and how it affects the literacy of them and

their entire rhizome upstream. When asked about sites they used for memes, Lilly said “Mostly

Facebook. And until right about when I came out about a year ago, 4chan as well, which was a

terrible, terrible experience and very bad for my mind.” I asked her throughout the interview to

expand more about her time on 4chan, since it was so unusual. She replied that

Yeah. I was on there, because like, for a while it was the only place I knew where there

was like a community of other people that were into trans girl femboy aesthetic. Again,

under the name, traps, which is a terrible term, but in this case, it is descriptive, because

that's what the 4chan community uses to describe people like me.

About her interaction with these “trap” focused meme boards, she said

Yeah. Because like, for a lot of trans women, that is how they encountered kind of the

idea of transition…. Seeing the content related to and surrounding the term traps, of

assigned male people who wear female clothing and look adorable and pass and are

Infamous here is no exaggeration, and 4chan is a particular beast when it comes to meme culture. It was founded

in 2003, the same year as Myspace, meaning it predates nearly every other current major meme website, and has

outlasted many others. It is composed of a series of anonymous message boards, most notably /b/, the random board.

4chan has a reputation for being chaotic and morally neutral, sometimes looking for justice, like when they exposed

a cat abuser who had been anonymously posting about his exploits. Sometimes, though, and perhaps more often,

they seek to shock with extreme language and images. Other boards can be even darker - for instance, the Buffalo

mass shooter was heavily influenced by /pol/, a far-right, white supremacist politics board. Due to its anonymous

nature and the reputation 4chan has, many memes start there even though the site is rarely mentioned, likely because

it is seen as controversial to frequent it.

desirable. Like despite its transphobic nature, one thing that trap-related memes do is

portray trans women in a desirable light, really… But the downside of the term trap is

that that beauty, that attractiveness, that passing-ness, those desirable qualities are framed

by that type of meme as a trap, like you're trying to fool this guy into buying them dinner

or taking them on a date. And then, "Ha ha, I actually have a dick. Joke's on you." Which

is bad, because gay panic laws are not really a thing anywhere. So that kind of tends to

encourage violence with that narrative.

However, despite the downside of “trap culture'', it did lead Lilly to one of her most-used social

websites, Discord. Discord in particular is popular among trans women, with Lilly jokingly

calling it a trans women’s dating site. She mentioned the connection between this and 4chan trap

culture as well, saying

There's a big overlap between the gamer demographic and trans women demographic.

Very few trans women I know do not play games. Like almost, like pretty much every

trans woman I know, except for one, has logged a hundred hours in five or six different

games… And then they're on Discord, and they're all like, "Hey, we're gaming, and we're

playing with each other, let's just make a server for it." And then other people start

joining the server and, yeah. So you can find Discord invites in really weird places. For a

long time, the primary Discord server that I was in, I found it because it had posted a

link... It was a Discord server that was mostly focused around femboys, trans women, and

the unfortunate term, traps. That was my primary Discord server for a long time, and the

link for it I found on 4chan on their /d/ board.

/d/ is a pornography board dedicated to hentai and other alternative forms of pornography -

hence its connection to “trap” subculture, which is heavily rooted in hentai. Hentai, which is

Japanese anime and manga pornography, is as a result closely connected to anime culture more

generally. It’s no coincidence, then, that Lilly mentioned the most popular memes being “Head

pats, UwU.”

She went on to explain that

I think part of that is like a lot of us trans women were like growing up as a guy in that

era and like, we can't be cute, because we're boys, and now we're like, "Well, that was

wrong." So we can be cute, so we're going to be cute. And it's really emotionally

gratifying to patient's someone's head and be like, "You're adorable, OwO." Or have your

head pat be called adorable, OwO.

UwU girl culture is directly related to anime culture. UwU is a Japanese emoticon meant to look as if the two U’s

are closed eyes and the w is a mouth. This type of emoticon is associated with kawaii culture. UwU as a more

general term is associated with cute, feminine nerd-girl culture, including anime, manga, and video game

subcultures.

There is a complex lineage here - a closeted trans woman interested in “traps” goes to a

pornography board where most of the porn of that nature is anime and manga. An interest in

anime, manga, and games that is common among trans women leads to a common lexicon from

those subcultures that is particular to trans women in queer meme communities. This then means,

as they read, repost, and make memes they often use UwU and anime cultural language to

communicate their shared backgrounds, and to reinforce positive feelings associated with a

common trans woman experience. That is, it feels good after transition to be told how cute and

feminine they are - and so they use a shared language of cuteness that they got from these

common cultural touchstones to develop their own queer meme community lexicon and

aesthetic.

Lilly’s case helps highlight the important role that reposts have in helping create the

constellation of queer meme communities. The various community literacy practices she

participates in help shape multiple kinds of community bonds across a variety of platforms. She

also helps show the ways language can vary across these constellations, and the ways that those

varied literacy practices are learned, utilized, and reproduced.

Case 3: Drew

Drew is a 27 year old white cis gay woman. She was out everywhere, but as we talked

realized on some platforms she had never posted about it - and thus, unless someone was looking

at her pages and events, they might not realize. Drew professed she was not particularly active on

social media, and did not make meme content ever. Like Lilly, she would send content onto

friends, but the difference for Drew is the highly curated way she chose to interact with reading

memes, which she viewed as her primary meme interaction.

Drew uses Facebook a small amount, for perhaps 20-30 minutes a day, mostly for things

like event information. Instagram, on the other hand, she uses much more often, and it is also

where she consumes her meme content. She did have a unique interaction with meme curation.

Most participants would curate meme creators, pages, and groups on their platforms of choice,

alongside their normal activity for that social media. Drew, however, is not very interested in

social media generally. But, since she enjoys memes, her entire instagram is a dedicated meme

curation feed. She described her behavior as:

There, I would say I follow maybe eight close friends, including my identical twin sister,

I should say who's straight, but very much in the queer scene to support. There, it's

mostly queer memes, artists, athletes and so to me, that content is more interesting. I

would say I check that one, not so much when I get up, but if I'm trying to distract myself

from work or procrastinate and I probably spend a little bit more time on that at a time.

Probably on there three to four times a day for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. On there

I would say I'm much more of an active participant. So, I actively like things. I actively

send things to my friends, whereas on Facebook, I would say it's almost all passive.

This dedicated kind of feed is rare, but its purpose mirrors the sentiments of many

participants - that even just reading memes, liking them, leaving the occasional comment, was a

way of connecting to the community. In her specific case, she was currently in graduate school

and felt isolated from the queer community there, where she had previously had a very queer

friend group. What Drew helps highlight is the way literacy practices, like staying “well-read” in

community memes even when you do not physically have as much access to the community, can

be a joyful and sustaining way to stay involved in the literacy of that community.

Drew as the Lurker-Curator

Much like how Lilly’s redistributive behavior helps the queer meme community rhizome

thrive, so does Drew’s. While it may at first appear Drew is only intaking with her literate

practices - reading, but rarely outputting, sharing only with a small group, not really participating

in the social media aspect of these sites - the nature of social media platforms makes her curation

function one that does in fact feedback into the queer meme community.

In her book Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble notes that for at least the past

decade, these traces of user activity have been influencing algorithmic search results, writing that

“This new wave of interactivity, without a doubt, is on the minds of both users and search engine

optimizing companies and agencies. Google applications such as Gmail or Google Docs and

social media sites such as Facebook track identity and previous searches in order to surface

targeted ads for users by analyzing users’ web traces” (54). Noble noted that at the time she was

writing that it had little effect on the search engine results, but could become a bigger player in

how content was dispersed. In Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Focault-Wells’

#HashtagActivism, they write that “the particular factors that lead racial and gender justice

hashtags to trend on Twitter may be a serendipitous result of the events and people popularizing

the hashtags, rather than a specific effort by Twitter to promote activism” (196). The influence of

user behavior on what content is served to other users continues to grow. Pop culture

publications like The Verge have articles about “How to teach TikTok what you like to watch,”

so that users can better teach the algorithm how to serve them content they enjoy. Nearly all

social media now serves content to users based on this kind of algorithmic feedback.

The increasing conversations around the ways algorithms affect our internet practices

mean that users like Drew, who spend time curating, reading, scrolling, and liking content, are

also influencing what others in their community see generated for their own reading by

Instagram’s algorithm. In fact, this curatorial influence on the reading of memes had happened to

Drew herself, as well as her straight sister, with her recounting

Yeah, I don't remember explicitly seeking out gay meme pages, but that's what people

were sending me and so I think, whenever I saw a really good one I would follow that

page. It's funny because my sister's account got hacked and she didn't have access to it for

a while so she just made a new one, and she followed me and my ex who we're both

really good friends with and her best friend and her current girlfriend. So, she followed,

essentially, four queer women and all of her suggested content was gay meme pages. So,

I think it is a pretty good algorithm overall. But yeah, I don't really remember searching

gay memes. It just was what people sent me.

The algorithm here is a vague notion - it sent her memes queer memes because she was friends

with queer people. In reality, though Instagram and Facebook are not open about how algorithms

determine what content is shown, the common understanding is that it is a conglomeration of

data about what other people in your demographics have liked - so those with similar age,

gender, sexuality, and other traits who have liked similar content all feed the data set that

determines what shows up on a given feed (Hardman Taylor and Choi, “An Initial

Conceptualization of Algorithm Responsiveness: Comparing Perceptions of Algorithms Across

Social Media Platforms”). So, for instance, in a vacuum, if 100 lesbians all like the same meme

that showed up organically, another lesbian might have it show up algorithmically. With the rise

of Tik Tok and the “FYP” this method of disseminating content to users is becoming more

popular.

In essence, Drew’s habit of curating everything queer memes means she is inputting a

strong dataset for Instagram’s algorithm - enough to significantly influence a straight woman’s

feed to show mostly meme pages.

The “for you page”, an algorithmically generated endless scroll feed of videos based on what tik tok thinks you’ll

like. It is the most popular way to consume content on tik tok and to make it onto a “FYP” feed is considered a feat -

a sign one is going viral. It also determines the “side” of tik tok your are on - for instance, certain users will say their

content has made it to the “wrong side” of tik tok - aka the FYP of people not in their target audience. Instagram has

introduced Reels to mimic tik tok.

The curation alone is not all that is feeding back into the queer meme algorithm. Drew is

also viewing, liking, and sharing, all of which helps the algorithm weigh what content to show

others. Again, Instagram is tight-lipped about the details, but certain actions are weighted more

heavily than others. For instance, if that same set of 100 lesbians all followed two meme

accounts but favored their likes toward one, that is the one that would be favored to be shown

algorithmically. Likes and other social media reactions are not, in themselves, emotional, nor do

they necessarily always correlate with positive emotion, but in many cases a like or follow is

meant to show approval. That algorithmic “weight,” then, is governed by emotional responses of

the user in the form of enjoyment in many cases.

Drew, when asked what makes her like or send a meme, said “I would say if it's good, if

it resonates with me, if the topic is something... For sure, if it makes me laugh. For sure. You

have to like that. I feel like that's just law. Somebody put time into it and it worked so you have

to appreciate it.” This was an apt response, recognizing that part of the moment where we give it

the like comes from our imagination of connection to the creator of the meme. It makes us laugh,

and we feel if someone has made us feel good, the least we can do as meme consumers is give

them some positive reinforcement. All this to say is, what Drew highlights here is that many

meme readers instinctively recognize that making the community laugh with these acts of queer

meme literacy, like the ones Adara describes doing, is an important kind of community work that

is given positive feedback and encouraged when executed well. While it is rarer, sometimes this

positive reinforcement is even enough to help improve a creator’s material well being. Drew

explained that

The lesbian meme ones specifically, like hotmessbian's or Xena: Warrior Princess, those

for sure. I feel super glad I found them. Enriched my life. The little zines that I bought

were $10 each and I was just honestly happy to financially support this account that's

brought so much joy to me and the people around me.

So, this lurker-curator role, where one mostly consumes and reacts to content, is still very

much involved in the community, and the community literacy practices, even when it might

appear not to on the surface. One agent’s reading practices always affects the whole of the

rhizome - for better or for worse, as Drew herself notes, saying that “The more general meme

pages like Pubity or Blessed One or whatever, their content is very hit and miss.

Every now

and then there's quite a bit of misogyny in their posts. Obviously, I don't really support that. So, I

don't like those memes.” Drew expresses awareness that a “like” is an active form of interaction

with memes, a literacy act she can disperse or withhold to express her views on content. A

lurker-curator like Drew is just as much actively engaging in community literacy acts as any

meme creator.

This pruning behavior helps keep undesirable behavior out of the rhizome. Of course,

there can still be rhizomes that encourage these oppressive behaviors, as more and more research

of algorithmic radicalization has detailed. (Huszár, Ferenc et al. “Algorithmic Amplification of

Politics on Twitter,” Tufecki, Zeynep “Youtube, the Great Radicalizer”) Some people will take

themselves out of connection with parts of the rhizome they deem harmful, unfollowing accounts

and blocking users, to protect themselves and as a result, in whatever minor way, curtailing the

spread of the harmful content. In chapter three, I discuss these behaviors in more detail as a kind

of “rhetorical not-listening” that is frequently detailed by queer meme community members,

especially in response to racism and transphobia.

Drew here is referencing zines made by the Xena queer meme page, which elsewhere in the interview she had

mentioned purchasing.

Pubity and Blessed One are both general audience meme accounts with large amounts of followers.

These three participants give a broad set of cases of user behavior in queer meme groups.

All three read queer memes as a core community literacy act, and respond to that reading in a

variety of ways. This form of reading, with its base in Black queer literacy acts, is fundamental

to the larger queer meme rhizome, enabling the creation of additional content as well as the

circulation and curation of existing content. Virality and circulation are guided in part by these

many literate acts, and that virality and circulation in turn creates more literate acts among the

many members of the rhizome. This deeper understanding of queer meme practices and their

connection to reading can leave the field with a few findings.

Through many individual acts of literacy, new genres of queer memes emerge, circulate,

and do various kinds of work for the community. Some of this work is about creating spaces of

joy where queer people can explore their identities and relationship with larger queer

communities without what Eric Darnell Pritchard terms “literacy self-suppression.”

This self

suppression is when marginalized people, and specifically for Darnell Pritchard, Black queer

people, hide from the gaze of normative literacy practices - for instance, camouflaging their

literacy practices by obscuring that they are reading a book with queer themes. For many

participants in my own project, escaping or dodging this gaze and being able to freely engage in

queer community literacy through queer meme groups is a source of joy, and allows them a

feeling of belonging.

To better understand queer writing and literacy practices, scholars must better understand

the role of emotion as part of community literacy. These participants describe joy, curiosity, and

friendship as integral to their meme experiences. It is only through understanding these

emotional aspects as part of queer community literacy that the social bonds being reinforced by

They also describe resultant forms of literacy that are about liberation and healing, but they specifically are

discussing Black queerness among multiple systems of oppression.

the literacy acts can come into focus. That is, when a person sends a meme as an act of joy and

affection, it becomes a kind of literate gift. That can help strengthen both, for instance, the strong

social ties of close friends in a group chat, and the weak social ties of those who share in a queer

Facebook meme group. The strengthening of these many kinds of bonds in a community leads to

better well-being overall.

This exploration of reading also gives insight into the complex meme thinking that goes

into both composing and reading memes. Here I’ve laid out three cases of literacy acts, all of

which are based in reading: reading as composing, reading as sharing and redistributing, and

reading as liking and curating.

Memes can only make sense to a reader with access to several registers of knowledge,

including current meme genres, broad swathes of pop and visual culture, queer cultural

discourse, and specific queer lexicons. In addition to these multiple knowledge registers to be

decoded, they also can require savvy of multiple platforms. Users may read in one platform and

share with friends to reinforce social bonds on a separate platform. A meme or meme genre may

start on one social media site and only proliferate elsewhere through many users participating in

these sharing activities. This is what I will explore in my fourth chapter: the way platforms and

their interfaces interact with meme literacy.

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Interlude

<speaker id="Abbie"> Okay. And just to wrap up, is there anything else, sorry, I'm getting a

weird echo off my thing. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd want to say or for me

to know about your experience with queer memes or how you interact with them? </speaker>

I guess one thing is, I don't know if it's just me, when I'm coming, but it feels like there's

definitely an upswell in meme generation, but that might just be me slowly finding these new

spaces. But at the same time, I also feel like most of the spaces and these memes just didn't exist

five years ago, 10 years ago. So, that.

</meme></speaker>

<speaker id="Abbie"> Do you have any idea why that might be, why memes are getting such an

uptick? </speaker>

I think just people, the tools are getting easier and the spaces are getting more inclusive for them

to proliferate. So you know, where it was before Discord ... Before Discord it would been really

hard to find a community like I have because, and I suppose a part of that is the gatekeeping

effect it has ironically enough. Because with Reddit, Reddit I'm more familiar with so there's a

lot of, even if those spaces existed, they could easily be like, what's the term? A lot of outsiders

could come and disrupt the community. So it just made it feel less safe I guess. But now with the

ability to ... I guess this is just like my own space, but like with the ability to just be more

selective with who we're interacting with, has made it a little bit easier that way.

</platform></speaker>

Chapter 3: Yas Queen, Slay: Appropriation, Imagination,

and Queers of Color

To laugh together is a kind of rhetorical identification, and memes especially seek

rhetorical identification in order to be funny. Memes, by their nature, are citational - they rely on

a portion that points to some shared cultural knowledge, like a still from Spongebob. They are

nonsensical if one does not have access to the community literacy knowledge needed to read that

citational work. To recognize that citation, and have the spark of recognition of that shared

knowledge, is a kind of rhetorical identification. The other part of memes includes text that the

audience is meant to find relatable, and that juxtaposes itself against the meaning of the citational

portion of the meme. In both portions, the audience is meant to recognize shared community

literacy knowledge that makes the meme legible, and text they recognize themselves within. Not

only does this function as a way of rhetorically identifying the meme composer with their

audience, but also both the composer and the audience with given communities, by both’s ability

to trade in this community literacy. This is how memes as a queer community literacy practice

help further cohere queer online communities - this literacy practice and the rhetorical

identification inherent in it becomes a way of bonding as a group via literacy acts.

Burke argues that this identification, with its three facets (identification by sympathy,

antithesis, and false assumption) are used to do the work of persuading an audience to align with

one’s cause. Kenneth Burke discusses his theory of rhetorical identification in “The Rhetorical

Situation,” where he outlines that “In brief, he may identify himself with such bodies or

movements, largely through sympathetic attitudes of his own… one’s notion of his own personal

identity may involve identification not just with mankind or the world in general, but by some

kind of congregation that also implies some related norms of differentiation or segregation”

(268). This rhetorical identification is useful in discussing how humor functions in community

literacy and in memes. To cohere a community is inherently to form an “us” through which the

group can rhetorically identify. Humor specifically is a way of cohering a community through

shared cultural understanding. This might include shared image knowledge and shared linguistic

practices, as well as shared semiotic referents. A meme, for instance, often relies on layers of

shared understanding about the interplay between the text and image, required layers of

knowledge both in its composition and from the reader, in order to fully make and decode

meaning. When a community member feels “seen” or shared community understanding is

achieved, it helps cohere the community through this sense of rhetorical identification.

This is different from a public, which is fundamentally a relationship among strangers

according to Micheal Warner in his influential work Publics and Counterpublics. In fact,

rhetorical identification with the community is an aspect that fundamentally makes a community

within a public. To rhetorically identify with the community literacy acts is to call oneself a part

of the “us,” and thus to move from a relationship among strangers to a relationship among

community members. You also cannot constitute a community through mere attention, another

aspect of Warner’s publics - attention alongside rhetorical identification is needed. If one finds,

as some participants do later in this chapter, that their rhetorical identification wanes within a

community via their literacy acts, they may choose to no longer be members of that community.

On the other side of this, some may use community-specific practices for communities they are

not a part of - to the detriment of the original community.

Appropriation

Queer meme slang often comes from marginalized groups within the queer community,

who are using this language to form sub-communities of safety and acceptance away from the

white supremacy enforced by the dominant queer community.

The association of this language

with these subversive and counter-cultural communities of survival gives them a kind of “cool”

factor. The dominant community will often then use the language for that cool factor, without

ever having to live through or improve the material conditions of those marginalized within their

own community. In his chapter “The Hipster” in Black Cool, Dayo Olopade notes that

specifically, the association of Black culture with hipster aesthetics has been happening since at

least the 1950s. Norman Mailer wrote his controversial piece “The White Negro” on the

relationship between hipsters and Black culture in 1957. Since, Olopade notes, young white

people lack the status of social outsider, to be seen as countercultural they must perform the

aesthetics of those who are seen as social outsiders - thus, the consumption and performance of

“Black Cool'' being such a large part of countercultural aesthetics. Journalist Priya Elan quotes

Wanna Thompson in his article on “blackfishing” as saying “‘It’s always been prevalent,’

Thompson says. ‘Be it fashion, beauty, or music. Black is cool, unless you’re actually black.’”

This can be seen in the queer meme community as well.

For example, take the term “yassifying.” Yassify is the verb form of “yaas,” a popular

slang term taken, as many meme terms are, from the Black and Latinx ballroom community, and

The line between queer slang and queer meme slang is blurry at best, but I focus here on slang used in memes.

Wanna Thompson is credited as having coined the term “blackfishing,” which is when a non-Black person utilizes

various aesthetics to appear Black, or at least to look more racially ambiguous. Common tactics include tanning and

photoshop to appear darker, use of Black hairstyles, and occasionally cosmetic surgery.

is popularly known as drag slang.

It is related to “yes” but pronounced in the over-exaggerated

fashion that morphs the e vowel sound into “ah,” often sustained longer than the traditional short

yes. Over the decades, more and more queer people have adopted the use of the term, which is

often used to show how well someone is doing. To be told “yas queen” is to be affirmed that you

are killing it at whatever you are doing. When one nails a look, it might be “Yas! Slay!” When

one lands a particularly scathing comeback during an argument a spectator might yell “Yas

bitch!” These are all points of emphasis that whoever is being told “yas” is doing great. The

association with drag culture brings with it an aesthetic association, as well. Drag makeup is

often bold and glamorous, and the kind of look that might get a “yas queen!” will feature this.

Eyelash extensions, overdrawn lips, contour and more are all a frequent part of the look. To

yassify something or someone, you apply these aesthetics. Often this is done with face filter apps

onto various images. For instance, one meme that circulates is the famous “Girl with the Pearl

Earring” painting with a face filter overlaid to make her look as if she has a “full glam” makeup

look.

Figure 6: Yassified Girl with the Pearl Earring

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme6

As David Mack notes in “Yassify, Fun Gay Slur, And The Loss Of All Meaning,” this

evolution is one where much of the original meaning of the slang is lost. With “yassifying” we

Note that drag and ballroom culture are in some ways intertwined but are separate things with different histories.

Ballroom will often have drag queens and several drag categories to perform in, but not every drag performance

takes place as part of ballroom culture, and not every ballroom performer is a drag queen. For more on gender

systems, drag, and ballroom, see Marlon M. Bailey’s “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in

Ballroom Culture.” Yaas as a term occurs in both but at the moment is popularly known as a drag term because of

the popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has introduced this kind of language into the mainstream.

see how a particular bit of language used to express approval became a meme about face filters.

This evolution can be fun - a kind of over-the-top performance of queerness via memeing. It can

also result in the loss of meaning of a term genuinely used by a marginalized community. It can

also be grating when memes of queer people of color slang go viral, while the prosecution and

marginalization of the groups that produce them continues to escalate. The same Black and latinx

drag queens and trans women who pioneered the looks yassifying is based on are being called

groomers, threatened, facing bills that try to outlaw their existence.

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Frustration with meme and pop culture appropriations of racialized experiences are well

documented. For instance, Lauren Michele Jackson writes in “We Need to Talk About Digital

Blackface in Reaction GIFs” about the frustration of white use of black people for reactions

GIFs. In her book White Negroes she similarly analyzes the way white people often pick up and

use AAVE for cultural clout, including for memes. In “The Blackness of Queer Vernacular,”

Chloe Davis writes that “this trend can strip and silence a community and its history. This

appropriation takes the styles and traditions (e.g., Black music, language, fashion, dance,

hairstyles) of a marginalized community without permission or even acknowledgment of their

origins. Cultural appropriation erases heritage and creates a false interpretation of history.”

This is not to correlate drag with trans women. For situations like this, where a few disparate groups share some

amount of overlap in literacy practices, I like Seth Davis’s organizing concept of the girls. They write “I use ‘the

girls’ as an organizing construct for several reasons. Black transwomen coined and defined shade. Colloquially,

Black gay men often call each other “girl” and refer to gay men more generally as ‘the girls.’” The overall point is

that trans women are not drag queens unless they are doing drag. Some drag queens, but not all or even most, are

trans. However, there is some amount of overlap in the literacy practices and slang used by Black and latinx trans

women and Black and latinx drag queens, and both groups are part of “the girls,” as noted by Davis. As a result,

sometimes I mention these groups together - not because they are the same but because of the overlap in literacy

practices.

For current updates on transphobic legislation, see the American Civil Liberties Union’s “Mapping Attacks on

LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures,” and the Trans Legislation Tracker website.

A popular version of many memes highlights the “pipeline” from the slang of Black women and QTPOC to white

gay men to white women. Shows like Saturday Night Live will then do skits on “Gen Z slang” where the slang is

actually the language originated by Black women and QTPOC.

These writers note this problem is not new, nor is it easily solved. As Jackson writes, it is not that

all uptake of language is inherently bad and should be banned - she writes that “Now, I'm not

suggesting that white and nonblack people refrain from ever circulating a black person’s image

for amusement or otherwise… nobody’s coming to take GIFs away” (“We Need to Talk about

Digital Blackface in GIFs”). After all, in an era where RuPaul’s Drag Race is a hit, it would be

hard to stop people from picking up on the slang used by the drag queens. Jackson does note,

however, that “no digital behavior exists in a deracialized vacuum.”

Not all meme uses are inherently liberatory, and queer meme literacies are no different.

There is a long history of the ways queerness and race are entwined, and queer people of color

have long discussed their marginalization within the queer community by white queer people.

Sylvia Rivera highlights this in her 1973 “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech, saying that “I have

lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with

you all? Think about that!... The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and

women that belong to a white middle class white club. And that’s what you all belong to!

REVOLUTION NOW!” Queer of color theory emerged in the early 2000s, building on feminist,

queer, and race scholars, including Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa. It seeks to weave together

multiple lenses of analysis in order to better understand the intertwined struggles of racism,

sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and disability. E. Patrick Johnson weaves these together in

“‘Quare’ Studies: Or or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My

Grandmother.” Johnson writes that “‘Quare,’ on the other hand, not only speaks across identities,

it articulates identities as well. “‘Quare’ offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at

the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges” (3). Johnson’s dissatisfaction with

queer theory was that its focus on destabilization of categories often left out the experiences of

selfhood and community experienced by queer people of color. Similarly, Roderick Ferguson’s

Aberrations in Black articulates queer of color theory as one where sociological perceptions of

blackness and queerness are intertwined. In essence, he argues that both are seen as aberrant and

non-normative, and that non-normative sexualities are frequently seen as such due to its

association with Blackness in particular. In reverse, whiteness and heterosexuality are

inextricably linked. Thus, whiteness acts as the site of production of cultural normativity that

includes marking both blackness and queerness as aberrant. As both these scholars and many

others note, queer theory and queerness are often loaded with the assumption that queerness is

white - it is queer of color critique that recognizes the way whiteness produces the structure of

normativity that sees queerness as deviant in the first place. Queer theory did not leave them

room to articulate their own experiences of queerness when coupled with their Blackness.

Despite the fact that much of the queer liberation movement work was done by people of

color, the ways white queer people enforce white patriarchal values within the community

remains. So much of what the public identifies as queer language is actually appropriated

language from queer and transgender people of color (QTPOC), especially Black and Latina

transgender women. This is well exhibited in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary on drag

balls, Paris is Burning. The film remains a hallmark of the age of New Queer Cinema in the 90s,

which featured independent films and many documentaries about queer lives, including those by

Sadie Benning and Jonathan Caouette.

The movie received a large amount of academic

attention from prominent scholars like Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Peggy Phelan. This

Sadie Benning is a visual artist who created video diaries from a young age on a children’s PixelVision camera,

often on the subject of her gender and sexuality. This is especially evident in The Videos of Sadie Benning, Volumes

1-3, which contain video diaries spanning from 1989-1998. This same use of “home footage” occurs in Jonathan

Caouette’s 2003 Tarnation, which uses a mix of home films, photographs, and other materials to explore his

relationship with his mother. Ruby B. Rich discusses the phenomenons of independent filmmaking and documentary

her 2013 book New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut.

attention helped solidify Paris is Burning as a queer cultural touchstone, and also helped

crystallize the aesthetic expressions of queerness that had developed since the 60s. What is worth

noting is that in the film, now over 30 years old, people use slang that is now popular on new

media platforms like TikTok. Slay, realness, tea are all popular terms now that were once terms

for insiders in the ball scene.

In fact, RuPaul’s Drag Race is key to understanding how linguistic uptake and

appropriation of QTPOC slang functions. The material conditions of capitalism are also tied into

the continued appropriation of QTPOC slang by white cis gay men and eventually by cis straight

white women. Yassifying is not just a fun meme that has, perhaps irritatingly, been co-opted by

white people to the point of it losing all its coherence. The cultural capital that white people gain

during their uptake of QTPOC language is not the only capital they obtain. There is often real

money to be made in the business of commodifying the fun of marginalized communities.

Capitalism has made every aspect of community commodifiable and language is no exception.

This commodification of queer QTPOC slang is also spurred along by the platforms

themselves, which have their own investments in capitalist systems and encourage certain kinds

of user behavior. This “politics of the tool stack” has often been discussed alongside systems of

power. For instance, Tara McPherson, in “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?: or

Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” called for more attention to code, tools, and

operating systems as enforcers of hegemonic and racist systems of thinking. McPherson explains

that all operating systems, if built by systems of logic reliant on hegemonic norms, reflect those

norms. In her case, this means UNIX and race, though for John Unsworth before her it was

There is a long history of queer coded language and dialects. Chadwick Moore profiles this in “Lavender

Language, The Queer Way to Speak” in Out Magazine. The PBS web series Otherwords also discusses queer

language history in “How Queer Communities Created Secret Languages.”

UNIX and capitalism. What is the most important takeaway is the revelation of the politics of the

tool stack: all tool stacks reflect their builders and the ideologies those builders hold. As

centralized, capitalistic social media platforms took hold, the platforms and their builders sought

to encourage users to create content that could be commodified.

Certain kinds of user behavior leads to better engagement. In some cases, groups and

pages are bought and sold for their advertising value. Many popular instagram meme accounts

like beigecardigan post ads and do sponsored content regularly to generate revenue, on top of

having stores full of branded merchandise. Since the platforms reward commodifiable content

with more reach and engagement, these accounts will attempt to make the most commodifiable

content in order to gain more reach for their sponsored and advertisement posts. In Tressie

McMilan Cottom’s “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of

Race and Racism in the Digital Society,” she writes that “Extraction and exploitation in the

digital society uniquely feel good… Racial capitalism can feel good to both the oppressor and

the oppressed. That is especially true in the digital society, where platforms and monopoly power

have distilled the efficient mining of human desire for profit” (446). What Cottom is highlighting

is that the politics of the tool stack often utilize feelings of pleasure to accomplish their goal -

and those goals are oriented around racial capitalism. Platforms push users not only to do certain

commodifiable behaviors, but to enjoy them - since fun leads to us engaging with and returning

to these platforms.

Shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race are easily memed and made into merchandise, sold on

sales websites like etsy and meme page merchandise shops. The best content is the most

memeable, since virality and engagement is encouraged by the platform (since this engagement

gets them more money from advertisers, who are willing to pay more for the promise of more

visibility.) Catchy and filled with cultural clout, many meme accounts co-opt QTPOC slang

specifically because this “sassy gay best friend” content, where white cis gay men parrot the

language of QTPOC and black women, tends to circulate well. Since it circulates well, white girl

meme accounts will co-opt it as well for their own financial benefit. This web of capitalism,

platform, and whiteness weave together to create conditions where not only is appropriation

happening, but that it is being financially incentivized. The QTPOC who coined the slang in the

first place and use it regularly rarely see the financial benefits of this. Not only are white queer

people and white meme accounts using the slang for the cultural clout without acknowledging or

experiencing the struggles of QTPOC, but they are also using the slang for financial gain.

The queer meme community even plays out some of this discourse among itself. Some

are as simple as flow charts showing the appropriation of slang from queer trans people of color

(QTPOC) to white cis gay men to white women. Some are more nuanced. For instance, an

exchange on twitter between user reMARQable and sippinlemonade was screencapped and

circulates as a meme. reMARQable states that “straight men really say ‘it’s giving…’ now lol,”

highlighting how far-reaching the queer slang has become. sippinlemonade replies that “they say

phrases from the LGBTQIA+ and still be homophobic, make it make sense…” with a still of a

yassified uncle Iroh from Avatar the Last Airbender.

Figure 5: tinyurl.com/memefigure5

Figure 7: Yassified Uncle Iroh and Twitter exchange between reMARQable and sippinlemonade

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme7

Both here are noting the appropriation of queer slang into the mainstream and the

hypocrisy that often accompanies it. Other memes note the racialized dynamic, including a

meme featuring Angel from POSE with an upset look facing a blonde woman, who is labelled

“white gays waiting on a new phrase to steal from the QTPOC community.” Angel, with her

unhappy look, is labeled “The QTPOC community.” These memes are both ways of grappling

with ways language circulates between various intersectionalities in marginalized groups.

Figure 8: Angel from Pose meme about white gay appropriation from QTPOC.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme8

In both cases, the annoyance expressed in the memes comes from the same core issue.

Cool - aesthetically, linguistically - is often associated with counterculture, but to be an actual

part of counterculture comes from being marked as a social “other.” To steal the aesthetic and

linguistic markers of this outsider status without facing any of the oppressions reserved for those

considered outside of hegemonic norms is to get the cool factor with none of the social

consequences. In fact, as sippinlemonade notes, those who are taking up the aesthetic and

linguistics of cool will just as often be enforcers of those hegemonic norms. For instance, some

amount of people who take up black queer slang will still enforce racist, homophobic, and

transphobic ideologies.

This meme is a reaction to the annoyance, the pain, the oppression of being derided by

the same people who then use your community’s practices for fun. In many instances, queer

meme fun is inextricable from pain. Lee Edelman discusses in Bad Education the way queerness

is entangled with jouissance, which he describes as a kind of joy toward oblivion, an ecstasy

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beyond the human ability to reason or make sense of. He writes that “enjoyment undoes

attachment to both self-interest and the collective good. Insofar as the subject can know itself

only as a subject of desire, jouissance subverts its self-interest by broaching the vanishing of the

‘self.’” His broader point is that queerness embodies the death drive toward jouissance, and

society rejects queerness because the ecstasy of the jouissance it embodies is bound up with

destruction of the social order. Memes like the one above are tangled up in that same jouissance.

The language of social “others” is the language of jouissance. Having been made countercultural

because they are deemed dangerous to the social order, Black people, queer people, and other

marginalized groups created their own slang. To refuse assimilation into that social order is to

embrace the queer death drive and jouissance - that is, to create a counterculture is to embrace

the outside of, and in some ways the oblivion of, social order. Jouissance is a kind of enjoyment

and pain at once. Even from their use of slang and the response to mainstream culture’s use of it,

memes like this are in some way about queer jouissance and as such, about both pleasure and

pain.

This meme has another level to it to triangulate the connection between pleasure, pain,

and desire, however. This is revealed by the emotion of the response. sippinlemonade and

reMARQable are not just noting the phenomenon - they are expressing unhappiness with it. It is

the same with Angel in the Pose meme: she, representing the QTPOC, is upset at the co-option

of slang. Memes like this are partially funny to the community not just because they

acknowledge the co-option of “cool” by others who would seek to marginalize the makers of

cool, but because they express the negative emotions that come as part of that response. It is a

kind of “laugh so you don’t cry '' response. This can seem to make light of and thus reduce the

pain of the negative emotion, making the laughter a shield from negativity. Instead, though, I

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think “laughing so you don’t cry'' is not a response meant to deflect negative emotions per se.

Instead, it can be viewed as aiming toward that queer jouissance. After all, jouissance and

queerness are both entangled according to Edelmen, and jouissance is not merely pleasure but

instead that ecstasy that entangles pleasure with pain. Laughter is a way to acknowledge, take

seriously, and negotiate with that pain as a community - not necessarily to get rid of the pain but

often simply to acknowledge that it is felt.

What these memes show us is that not only do these tensions around language circulation

exist, but that some of these communities have an awareness of them. This indicates that meme

communities not only use memes to share connection through laughter but also to sever it.

The ability to decode a meme means an understanding of a community’s literacy

practices - but not necessarily agreement. If, for instance, one could decode a meme but found its

values misaligned with their own, it could result in several things. Some would cause

“discourse.” This term is used in online communities for a kind of back and forth debate, usually

on a subject deemed “political” like, in this case, language appropriation. In many ways, this is

related to rhetorical definitions of Discourse like the one used by James Paul Gee.

He writes in

“Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” that “Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms

of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as well as gestures,

glances, body positions and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of 'identity kit' which comes complete

with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take

on a particular social role that others will recognize” (6). Discourse in the meme community

sense is almost a kind of rupture to Gee’s Discourse. If his Discourse is about taking on a

particular social role, an internet discourse is about friction within those social roles. These social

Gee differentiates between “discourse” and “Discourse.”

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antagonisms are frequently regulated over time by group rules and policed by moderators to keep

coherence within a given internet group. If internet discourse causes enough of a rupture, or if

members find the policing of certain internet discourses as too restrictive, some community

members may simply leave a community completely as a result, whether it means unfollowing

an account (or several) on instagram or leaving a Facebook group. Sometimes enough of a

schism will cause offshoot groups to form where particular values are explicitly stated and

upheld in response to those internet discourses.

Imagination

This response to the values of meme groups, where participants leave in response to

content they object to, came up frequently in participant’s responses. While the majority of

participants were white, the queer people of color frequently mentioned a group’s values about

race was often a determining factor in whether they would stay in a community. White

participants frequently answered that responses to Black Lives Matter and other racial justice

movements (as well as trans inclusion) were important to them. Community literacy scholars

have often unpacked the way race intersects with community literacy practices. For instance, in

Beverly Moss’s A Community Text Arises, she outlines the role of sermons as community

literacy in Black communities. Her work emphasizes that literacy happens in a variety of spaces

and places, and is influenced by expectations of culture, genre, and community. Eric Darnell

Pritchard outlines both the normative and liberational literacy practices of Black queer

participants across a variety of spaces in Fashioning Lives. My participants explore their own

relationship to race, queerness, and community literacy practices in a variety of ways, depending

on how their own values aligned or misaligned with the groups.

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I think of my two data sets from participants in the rest of this chapter as two “stories”

that are being told via the community literacy practices around race in meme groups. One, the

story of race in queer meme spaces told through the lens of whiteness, and the second, the story

of race in queer meme spaces as told by queer people of color. The first story addresses how

white community members imagine their own solidarity via memes in meme groups, where

group values are solidified via meme composition as well as the responses to those compositions.

The second story addresses how queer people of color navigate the racism, cisheteropatriarchy,

and ableism that permeates the queer community via their experience in meme groups. It also

addresses how they imagine better spaces for composing for queer people of color. The

communities try, succeed, and fail to protect their most vulnerable members, and this reflects the

complex ways communities can be defined in these online spaces.

Race in memes primarily was brought up by white participants when they were asked

what made them feel included or excluded in a community. For instance, I asked Avery, “Sort of

related, are there any tensions in your meme groups that are long-standing, like things that

people doing like to be brought up, or that might be against the group rules to say, or things that

are just a sore spot within the queer meme communities you're part of?” Part of Avery’s response

was:

…there will be posts like, "We're not trans exclusionary. Homophobia will obviously will

not be tolerated, but neither will racism, xenophobia, transphobia." Because I know that

other meme groups have had issues of preference memes or associating particular types

of behavior or physical attributes with a specific race. So because they've learned from

the drama of other groups, my meme groups have rules about what can and cannot be

included, which appreciate by I know other folks may feel is limiting. But, these groups

are allowed to set their own norms.

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Avery specifically calls groups that share her values and that she participates in “my

meme groups,” a way of linguistically indicating her identification with them.

In the same

answers, both also note the values they do not belong to and identify with. Lynn says it outright:

she will not even be a passive community member of a community with racist or transphobic

values. Avery indicates the antithetical nature of groups that have racist values to her own

groups, calling them “other” meme groups. Rhetorically, she draws a hard line between groups

that are hers and share her values, and those that do not.

Avery, like many of the white participants, identified the values of this meme group as

important to her own membership. She is not alone in thinking through their own group

participation this way. Kale, for instance, said that:

I've definitely left a lot of LGBT groups that focus on the gay male experience, because

I'm like, that's just not... There's so much to that. I'm like, "I'm getting bored of you guys

too, honestly." Ru Paul's Drag Race, great. Who cares? Also, Ru Paul is blatantly

transphobic. And also, I'm like, "You're just using Black women as a caricature for your

humor and not crediting them at all." So there's definitely been, I think in what I was

saying before, I've definitely left a lot of LGBT groups and migrated more to queer

groups that are intersectional. I've left any group that's like, "We're not political, or we're

not going to talk about political content." I'm like, the personal is political. You cannot

divorce the two. Yeah, and I felt really at home in a lot of more lefty, less serious but also

more socialist groups, where it's like I don't get all the jokes, I am not very well nuanced

about what Marxist Leninist specifically is. I know what tankies are, and that they're

bullshit. But I feel better in those kinds of groups because they tend to be more

intersectional, and they tend to push me to be better at recognizing my own biases and

privileges and stuff.

Both Avery and Kale express appreciation for groups that seek to explicitly address racism in

memes. Rhetorical identification can be used to help further understand these answers by

understanding the way concepts of identity, both of the self and of others, tie into rhetorical

situations.

As noted earlier in this dissertation, uses of words like “my” is a part of how scholar Stephanie Kershbaum

outlines the rhetorical ways of talking about in-group and out-group dynamics.

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Both identification by sympathy and identification by antithesis are at work here. Kale

notes that the groups they feel most welcome in are ones she shares common values with -

groups that talk actively about marginalized members of the queer community, like people of

color and transgender people. They mention specifically seeking to be pushed to do better as a

white ally to unpack their own bias and privilege within the queer community, demonstrating

that they value social justice within their groups. Both specifically mention seeking groups that

embrace intersectionality

. And returning to Burkean ideas, answers like Avery’s, with “other”

groups being the antithesis of their own values, show a rhetorical identification via antithesis.

Both participants do what is one common response to seeing a community use literacy practices

in a way they feel does not align with their values: they leave.

In Rhetorical Listening: Gender, Identification, and Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe takes up

Jacqueline Jones Royster’s call from “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” which

serves as an epigraph and guiding question for the book: “How do we translate listening into

language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response?” (38) In her uptake of Royster,

Ratcliffe describes rhetorical listening, and calls for listening across difference. The participants

here are eager to listen across one kind of difference - that is, a difference rooted in intersectional

understandings of the queer community. They imagine the action of rhetorical listening in these

spaces as a way of supporting different identities within their community. Listening to more

marginalized voices and supporting those traditionally harmed by the overwhelming whiteness

of many queer meme communities is a value they wish to demonstrate. However, there is a kind

of difference they are not willing to listen across. That is the difference across values that enacts

A term first used by Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain how and why Black women face a different

kind of misogyny than their white women counterparts, and a different kind of racism than their

Black men counterparts.

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harm. What they do instead is a kind of rhetorical not-listening, a shunning of these more

harmful values. They view this harmful other as their own antithesis and to refuse to partake in

listening to it as a way of weakening its power. This is evident when Kale says “I've left any

group that's like, ‘We're not political, or we're not going to talk about political content.’ I'm like,

the personal is political. You cannot divorce the two.” They view the “non-political” groups as

antithetical to their own belief that the personal is political, and leave groups that encourage that

belief. The separation of the personal from the political that Kale is referencing is harmful as it is

usually deployed within meme groups to keep marginalized groups whose identities are deemed

political from discussing the harms being done to them. For instance, as mentioned before, a

common rule in large, majority white meme groups is “no discourse.” What this comes to mean

is that QTPOC are reprimanded (for example) for highlighting microaggressions in memes

posted by other members because it is considered “discourse” or “political.” An earlier part of

the Royster quotation above asks “but when do we listen? How do we listen? How do we

demonstrate that we honor and respect the person talking and what that person is saying, or what

the person might say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak?” and in

this case, the participants have demonstrated that they can also not listen and not participate in

certain queer meme communities to demonstrate that they will not tolerate disrespect of

vulnerable and marginalized community members. When do we not listen?

Many op-eds and think pieces seek to understand the “social media echo chamber,”

describing it as a kind of groupthink or as potentially radicalizing.

This rhetorical not-listening

seems to be the flip side of that argument. Does being a part of a community with values one

See Cinelli et al., “The Echo Chamber Effect on Social Media,” and Paolo Barberá’s “Social Media, Echo

Chambers, and Political Polarization” chapter in Social Media and Democracy.

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deems harmful equate to groupthink? Does it lead to harmful radicalization in a way rhetorical

listening would help mitigate? The data does not make clear whether this rhetorical not-listening

is effective as an anti-racist tactic in the queer community, only that it is a common response to

seeing racism play out in queer meme groups.

This rhetorical not-listening indicates what the participants imagine themselves as as

members of the community. This is an imagining of the self as a white ally through identification

and rhetorical (not) listening practices. Note that imagining here does not mean they are not

“good” allies in actuality - it is that regardless of whether or not they are “good” allies to people

of color in the queer community, through their rhetorical identification they have indicated they

have that vision of themselves that they want to demonstrate through certain rhetorical practices.

Notably outside of this rhetorical allyship race was rarely mentioned, as expected for those who

Peggy Phelan would describe as “unmarked” in their race - beyond thinking across difference,

whiteness was rarely surfaced, and while white participants occasionally critiqued this default

assumption of whiteness in the queer community, they rarely discussed their relationship with

their own whiteness in the ways the participants of color did.

Only a handful of the people I interviewed described themselves as people of color: 4 out

of 32, or 12.5%. Though a smaller group, focusing on these as a set of case studies helps

illuminate the way QTPOC see how race and queerness interact for them across both dominant-

white queer meme communities and queer meme groups specifically for QTPOC. Their stories

about the relationship between race and queerness are very different from the white stories of

allyship, but many still participated in rhetorical not-listening.

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Lynn, for example, had mentioned not joining a particular meme group because she did

not want to be associated with the values the group was displaying. When I asked her about

feeling included or not in certain groups, she responded:

Yeah. So, that group was one of them, where I did not want to associate with those

values. I'm trying to think if there was other groups that I had to leave, based on ... Yeah.

I think probably in the past there's been a couple of groups that someone will post

something that's, again, phobic to a specific community within the LGBTQ, which makes

no sense. So, I'll leave based on that or any racist stuff within LGBTQ because that also

still exists, I'll leave that. And as far as a group where I've been like, "Oh yeah, this is

something I definitely fit into. Love this group." Is the ones that will talk about BLM and

talk about trans women and talk about how we wouldn't be where we are with gay rights,

if it wasn't for black trans women, stuff like that. It's those groups, are the groups that I'm

usually like, "Yeah." Because again, has that intersectional.

The difference between this narrative of not-listening and white allyship narratives are, of

course, that Lynn is not an ally - she is the person of color who would be directly harmed by

racist uses of meme community literacies. Additionally, the narratives queer people of color have

about their relationship between their queerness and race often go much further than white

narratives. Since they are not the “unmarked” whiteness, their race is thus surfaced for them

constantly, and as Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, the experiences of those at the intersection of

queerness and race are not the same as those of white queer people, and their queerness cannot

be disentangled from their experiences of their race.

When I asked Lynn, for instance, what her experience with her social media websites was

like, she responded:

Well, recently with everything that's been going on with BLM, it's been mostly posting

about that, spreading awareness on racial injustices. And then, with Pride Month, last

month, a lot of that was overlapping with intersectionalities of oppressed identities. So, a

lot of the things that I was sharing then were BLM and rights, and lesbian rights and gay

rights, and how those, the protesting and the rioting that was seen during Stonewall, also

should be supported during the Black Lives Matter movement.

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So while she also left groups that allowed for racist or transphobic posting, that was not

the only time race surfaced for her. She spent her average day as a member of online

communities thinking and posting about racial justice. Thus she has moved from the rhetorical

(not) listening to a rhetoric rooted in acts of writing and sharing. While both are important parts

of community literacy acts, the making and spreading of content is a more composition-focused

set of acts than rhetorical listening is, and Lynn is certainly making these literacy acts a regular

part of her online presence.

EBY100, another person of color, reflected on the experience of being marginalized

within meme groups. When asked what made them feeling included or excluded, said:

I think in a lot of queer groups, the majority, or at least it feels like the majority of the

participants are white, so I don't see a lot of the queer person of color experience in the

content, or a lot of acknowledgement of the fact that intersectionality of identities exists

as much because we're here to be queer, and we're not here to be queer and brown. If you

want to do that, there's a group for that probably. So it feels like in a lot of the bigger

groups, you have to be very racially inclusive, and what that means is white is the default.

So in that, that's a problem with a lot of big groups, big fandoms, big anything.… So in

that, I don't feel super represented a lot of the time. I think that's a big failing of these

groups, but I also understand why people wouldn't want to take the effort to change it

because that's a lot, and it's hard for one person to stand up and start having the

conversation.

EBY100 is Indian-American and also takes part in a meme group specifically for queer

Indian-Americans. They said that “On that one, I will interact with everybody a little bit because

I feel more comfortable doing so, just because I know I'm not going to be attacked for something

that I say as much. But then in the bigger meme groups, I will mostly just tag my friends in real

life, or my sister.”

EBY100 then sees the overwhelming whiteness of queerness as inherently isolating. For

them rhetorical identification in these spaces looks different. White allies imagine a space for

betterment and rhetorical listening, while EBY100 experiences a space that does not line up

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neatly with either identification by empathy or identification by antithesis. They take part in

these groups where their marked race is constantly reinforced to them - they feel the presence of

the us vs. them of identification by antithesis and yet, they still remain within these communities.

While we saw Avery above navigate “my groups” versus “other groups” rhetorically, EBY100

has a much more complex rhetorical relationship with what is “theirs.” When noting how these

majority white groups handle race, they say “we’re here to be queer, we’re not here to be queer

and brown. If you want to do that, there’s a group for that probably.” What is worth noting here

is EBY100 assuming the speaker position of the group as a “we,” which they are simultaneously

part of but also being told to disidentify from part of their identity to fully belong to. While in

this speaker position, they identify someone like themselves at the intersection of the racial and

queer identities as a “you,” singular and outside of the communal we. When Muñoz discusses

disidentification as part of queerness, he writes that “Disidentification is a performative mode of

tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive

and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology.” (97). EBY100 is tactically recognizing

themselves as part of the majority white groups with the “we’re not here to be queer and brown.”

They recognize the default to whiteness as the exclusion of their brownness, and are tactically

including themselves as part of that “we” regardless, in order to have access to that part of queer

meme culture. They are both the “we” that is queer, but not queer and brown while still

simultaneously being the “you” that has to go to other groups that are queer and brown. EBY100

finds this act of rhetorical disidentification with their race within these groups frustrating, but

performs it all the same. This, though frustrating, gives EBY100 access to both kinds of queer

meme groups and both their community literacy practices as a result.

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They navigate this with a complex series of literacy acts, being more passive in these

larger, overwhelmingly white groups where they do-but-don’t quite belong even if the group

members are well-meaning. But their plurality of communities allows them other ways to enact

their community literacy, with more freedom in groups focused on their particular intersection of

identities. They no longer have to disidentify in their queer Indian-American group, and thus are

more willing to participate in a wider variety of community literacy practices, which they do not

have full access to while disidentifying from their race in majority white groups. Memes like the

Angel from Pose highlight the kinds of community literacy practices that occur in communities

where race is seen as part of the queer experience - like the sapphic Indian groups EBY100 is

part of. These groups can discuss their racialized experiences of queerness, like annoyance with

white queer language appropriation. In majority white groups, this kind of discussion is less

common and might be seen as starting “discourse” or being hostile. Even where there is not

outright hostility to the idea of it, QTPOC in these groups still might feel it would be

unwelcome, since, as EBY100 notes, “we’re here to be queer, not here to be queer and brown.”

This implies that the default is to leave racialized experiences of queerness unmarked - and

unremarked, as a result.

Lynn and EBY100 both imagine through their rhetorical and literate practices very

different interaction between their race and their queerness. White participants rhetorically

identified with and imagined themselves as white allies, turning away from racist practices and

rhetorically listening within these large groups. Lynn imagines a different kind of identity.

Instead of rhetorically listening, Lynn composes and shares about more actively, making her race

part of their everyday community literacy act. EBY100 has a different approach to their identity,

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disidentifying as they feel is needed in majority white queer online spaces, and participating

more directly with the queer Indian-American community instead.

Memes, Race, and Queer Writing

These participants highlight that queer community literacy functions differently for

QTPOC than it does for white queer people. While both may take part in rhetorical not-listening,

QTPOC have additional queer community groups, where the intersections of their identities are

easier to talk about and celebrate. As Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, this is “because the

intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not

take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which

Black women are subordinated” (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black

Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” 140).

The experience of QTPOC is not the racism they face plus homophobia. Crenshaw was

discussing legal analytical frameworks, but each of these queer community groups also have

frameworks to build group understanding and camaraderie. That is, the gap that these

participants feel between the more niche QTPOC groups and the larger groups is that the larger

groups, framed within an unmarked white queerness, lack intersectional community literacy

practices through which the QTPOC participants could feel more fully enmeshed within the

community. Peggy Phelan, in Unmarked, writes about walkers in a ball in Paris is Burning

approximating whiteness, noting that “The walkers admire ‘whiteness’ in part because it is

unmarked and therefore escapes political surveillance” (95).

The unmarked whiteness is seen as the default and remains unarticulated. Only other

races are marked in white supremacist society and thus must articulate their race as part of their

queerness. Since whiteness rarely has to use language to denote itself, the white queer

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community generally lacks language and thus lacks the ability to articulate race as part of the

white queer experience. Sylvia Wynter, in her article “Sambos and Minstrels,” notes when

discussing racism that it is a phenomenon born from whiteness, and that part of the pathology of

racism is the “the fact whiteness is taken as a given, rather than as a striking phenomenon calling

for extensive research.” Since white queer groups have never had to develop that language, not

only do they never perform composition literacy acts with it but they also lack the literacy act of

reading it and thus truly understanding it. What this means is that white queerness is a racialized

queerness, but because it is unmarked it is a racialized queerness without a literacy of itself as

racialized. The inability to express the racialized nature of white queerness, and its social

position as default and unmarked leave white queer people lacking the ability to discuss white

queerness as racialized queerness. This lack of literacy also leaves many white queer people

unable to understand literacies around marked racialized queerness. This inability to be

understood by those lacking literacy around racialized queerness is part of why QTPOC feel they

need additional, more niche communities to share memes in - because they need a fuller shared

community literacy to feel more fully understood.

This evacuation of meaning as a result of the commodification of community literacy

practices helps return to the idea of linguistic appropriation of QTPOC. The uptake of QTPOC

language by white queer people is, for better or worse, inevitable. Not only does the internet

allow for the rapid dissemination of language, the overarching force of capitalism constantly

seeks out new, novel language and ideas from marginalized groups for counter cultural “clout” in

order to commodify them for sale. The issue is systemic - it is not that cis white straight girls

cannot make yaassify memes, or that they are purposely doing so to cause harm. It is that they

are doing so as part of the larger mechanisms or white power structures that exist to extract

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marginalized community meanings to serve whiteness and capitalism. It is this extraction that

contributes to the evacuation of meaning of QTPOC slang.

Earlier I outlined the way “yaas” functioned as in-group slang, and then as a meme in the

form of yassification. Meme aggregate pages post this kind of content to boost their own profile,

making money off ads and merchandise. Eventually, the commodification is so far reaching that

it is disconnected not just from QTPOC, and not just from queerness, but disconnected from any

community meaning at all. This can be seen with Yaasification shirts available on AliBaba and

other mass merchandise sites. Initially, yaas had a real community literacy function - an in-group

way to express queer approval. With the meme, it became a fun way to introduce aesthetics of

queerness into images not normally associated with queerness. But the rhetorical escape velocity

eventually pulled it out of the queer orbit, an empty slogan on a t-shirt. Even if the t-shirt was

used to show off queerness via knowledge of in-group slang, it is in many ways hollow

compared to the actual communication between the QTPOC who initially used it. It has no

community function, and it has none of the fun or play of the meme itself. Instead, it is simply

another example of rainbow capitalism.

This evacuation of meaning has deep implications for community literacy practices. Not

only does unmarked white queerness lack the literacy of racialized queerness, but in addition

whiteness is also constantly seeking to evacuate the meaning of the language of racialized

queerness that does exist. This is fundamentally a way to prevent communities from cohering,

since communal meaning and understanding through literacy acts is one of the reasons

Rainbow capitalism is when companies make LGBT merchandise or advertisements specifically to target LGBT

people as a market demographic. Often, these companies do little to nothing to support the communities and some

actively harm them. For more on rainbow capitalism as a phenomenon, see articles in Refinery 29 “The Best Part Of

Pride Is Making Fun Of Rainbow Capitalism” by Michelle Cortes, and Black Entertainment Television article “How

Rainbow Capitalism Harms the Origins of What Pride is About” by Da’Shaun Harrison, among others.

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community literacies come to exist. It also forces disidentification onto the marginalized groups,

since as Muñoz writes, “Can a self or a personality be crafted without proper identifications? A

disidentifying subject is unable to fully identify or to form what Sigmund Freud called that ‘just-

as-if’ relationship. In the examples I am engaging, what stops identification from happening is

always the ideological restrictions implicit in an identificatory site” (Disidentifications 7).

EBY100 demonstrated a disidentification where they simultaneously had to tactically disavow

their brown queerness in order to participate in the majority white queer meme groups, while still

participating in other groups specifically for QTPOC. To identify with this unmarked but still

racialized group when convenient is a way of negotiating these ideological restrictions around

race, while still maintaining their identification as a queer person of color in other groups.

That is, the disconnect queer people of color feel from primarily white meme groups that

lack language to wrestle with whiteness and queerness, and instead leave that whiteness

unmarked and unremarked, are the hurdle to QTPOC being able to identify as part of those

groups. Instead, they must in some way disidentify with their queer of color experience to

partake in the white queer meme experience - a fact which members like EBY100 recognize

when they mention that “we are not here to be queer and brown.” This fragmentation of identity

and of rhetorical identification is what makes the niche groups more welcoming - since they are

about intersectional identities, they do not share the lack of language the primarily white groups

do, and do not require tactical disengagement from marked racialization to fit with the unmarked

white racialization.

Fundamentally, the fragmentation stalls coalition building and separates us from doing

important work for the queer movement - and most often leaves white queer people

unaccountable in regards to racial justice movements. As Muñoz notes “People of color, queers

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of color, white queers, and other minorities occasionally and understandably long for separatist

enclaves outside of the dominant culture. Such enclaves, however, are often politically

disadvantageous when one stops to consider the ways in which the social script depends on

minority factionalism and-isolationism to maintain the status of the dominant order” (14). If

fragmentation is longed for as a site of community but politically disadvantageous because of

social scripts, marking whiteness as part of a racialized queerness is a possibility for flipping that

script while still allowing subcommunities to flourish. Part of this work is recognizing language

practices that may be harmful to communities within meme groups – the language practices that

evacuate meaning from the community literacy practices of other marginalized people.

To make identification possible, to no longer be the force of rhetorical disidentification,

would ideally be a way to hold whiteness to account, to mark it. To hold white queerness as

“raced” and remarked could thus jolt white queer people out of complicity with the overarching

structures of whiteness that inherently intertwine with transphobia and homophobia. As scholar

Cathy J. Cohen notes in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of

Queer Politics?,” “differentials in power exist within all socially named categories. And through

such recognition we may begin to envision a new political formation in which one's relation to

dominant power serves as the basis of unity for radical coalition work in the twenty-first

century” (452). The better white queer people learn to articulate their own raced experience, and

thus the roles racism, ableism, sexism, and other dynamics of power play in homophobia and

transphobia, the better opportunities all queer people will have for radical coalition building and

revolutionary work that seeks to dismantle all systems of oppression.

It is not that the memeification of QTPOC language is good or bad - simply that it exists

within the current white, capitalist, homophobic, transphobic structures of society and thus, like

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most mediums for language and communication, can do harm. For instance, some members of

the queer community may want to have queer meme shirt, like the yassification one, that they

purchase to signal to other queer meme community members that they too are queer, as a way to

form social bonds. A shirt can be a signal that helps others recognize that you share their

community literacy practices. They can also be meaningful expressions of art and solidarity.

Some shirts may be made by small business and queer people, and purchasing them may

materially help other queer people. Still, some of this may evacuate meaning if the uptake of

QTPOC slang is memefied and then sold only by white queer people. However, this harm can

be safeguarded against in some scenarios, or minimized in others.

Consumption of queerness is not the same as taking part in the queer community, but it

can be an important part to how people take part in the community. It is not too dissimilar from

memes - just consuming queer memes is not the same as being queer and taking part in the

community, but for many it is part of how they interact with queer community members. Greater

harm comes with greater commodification. Shirts like the Yassification one can represent

meaningful community engagement and interaction when, for instance, purchased from QTPOC

creators. Less so when they are bought from mass retailers like AliBaba, where there is no

material good for queer people and where queerness is merely a marketing demographic and

memes cease to have meaning as community literacy practices. This is becoming truer as internet

bots and natural language processing models progress. It is common for bots to crawl through

twitter comments that mention wanting something like a meme on a shirt and post a response

with a bot-generated shirt of the tweet, telling them to buy it. When this happens to a queer

meme, no one in the community materially benefits and it renders the core community literacy

act started by QTPOC meaningless, simply a piece of fodder for the bots to sell for the benefit of

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massive retailers. As much as the AliBaba-ification of yaasification is a bleak reminder that

capitalism will eventually render all fun commodifiable, it is symptomatic of hegemonic power

systems more than a direct harm. Thoughtful consumption of queer memes and the resulting

products they sometimes generate can help negotiate this without completely negating the

meaning a queer meme shirt could have for an individual. There are community literacy acts and

practices that white queer people can learn to help mitigate the evacuation of meaning for

QTPOC community literacies.

White queerness has so far discovered how to use rhetorical not-listening to mark their

allyship. So what other possibilities are available for community literacy? In the next chapter, I

discuss the role of platforms and escape velocities in queer meme communities. White queer

people can be more aware, for instance, of how platforms facilitate uptake and have different

audiences, which has the potential to be a useful tactic. Queer memes circulating more

thoughtfully to counteract the evacuation of meaning and the commodification of fun on

networked publics could help mitigate some amount of the rhetorical escape velocity, keeping

these community literacies where they have meaning.

White queer people could also learn to articulate their own whiteness as part of their

queerness. These kinds of practices are about making white queer people literate to the already

existing community literacy acts that QTPOC have already been doing, in order to better ally

themselves to their struggles. Instead of an evacuation of meaning, then, the meaning becomes

legible and an intersectional approach to queer community struggles becomes more viable.

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Interlude

<speaker id="Abbie"> What do you want me as a researcher to know about you and your

feelings about and interactions with memes, that you didn't get to talk about already, that you

think it's important that I know? </speaker>

I would say that memes are really important to me as a queer person, and I feel like to the larger

queer community, especially because I grew up in a suburb that is white heteronormative, very

what I would view as closed. So sort of being able to realize that there are other people who are

like me and can relate to me and I've had the same experiences as I have, is very validating. And

I feel like social media has been a great place for that to happen, just as the same as more

representation and shows and things like Netflix as well. So I would say it was not instrumental,

but very important in sort of me coming to terms with my sexuality and being okay with it and

feeling like a part of the community.

</sharedHumor></queer></meme></speaker>

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Chapter 4: Plat(form): Composition, Form, and the Shaping

of Memes

As previous chapters have demonstrated, memes are a community composition and

literacy practice. My last chapter focused on the evacuation of meaning that can happen when

people outside of communities uptake community-specific practices, and the ways rhetorical not-

listening helps establish community values and boundaries. In this chapter, I will explain how

these many community practices change and are changed by the digital tools available to read,

compose, and circulate memes. First, I will outline a background on technology and the

pressures it exerts during composition. Then, I will discuss bimbocore and vaporwave, two

meme aesthetics that emerged as responses of queer people to oppressive ideologies. This

understanding of the pressures of platforms, aesthetics and community helps triangulate the

various pressures that shape community literacy practices.

Rhetoric and composition and visual culture as fields both have a long history of

analyzing the effects of technology on writing and art. When woven together, these two fields

can give a strong theoretical understanding to help interpret what my participants have

experienced in their own meme groups.

Visual culture theory as a field has often discussed the various pressures of technology

not just on art itself, but on the cultures making and consuming art. Walter Benjamin, before the

modern computer was conceptualized, writes in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of

Technological Reproduction'' that “The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the

relation of the masses to art” (36) which he outlines as something that occurs with various forms

of technology throughout various points in history. In the age of reproduction technologies, it

fundamentally alters the relationship of the masses to art in the contemporary moment. Nicholas

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Mirzoeff, in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, outlines the way structures of

power like governments and police forces seek to dictate visuality - controlling who has the right

to look. After outlining several specific examples of governments leveraging technology of

visuality for imperial purposes, he writes that “this is post-panoptic visuality for a new era, a

neovisuality enabled by global digital technology that nonetheless understands itself to be part of

a centuries-old tradition” (294). Mirzeoff, like Benjamin, is interested in the ways technology

and culture are intertwined in visuality.

Similarly, rhetoric and composition has a long history of interest in technological

pressures on composition. In Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self, Rhodes and

Alexander take up Benjamin’s work, alongside that of Bruno Latour and Coctaeu. They note that

“the work of understanding how our technologies and the objects with which we compose orient

us continues.” They are interested in the orienting of composition by technology from a

particularly queer lens, as well. These same authors also note in On Multimodality: New Media

in Composition Studies that as more composition scholars take interest in digital forms of

composing that it is important to understand the ways those technologies differ and sometimes

exceed the textual, in order to truly understand the rhetorical situations and possibilities at hand.

This call for understanding seems a useful alignment between visual culture’s long-standing

interest in technology, culture, and visuality, and Rhodes’ and Alexander’s interest in the ways

the digital multimodal composition exceeds our current discussion on textual rhetorics. Articles

like “XM <LGBT/>” seek to bridge these conversation with the digital humanities interest in

tools and methods, writing that “If all tools and systems have politics, one needs to explicitly

build counter-hegemonic systems if they want to resist re-inscribing hegemony through tool and

system choices” (DeCamp). This is true not just for the politics of the tools of coding, but also

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for the tools of writing and composition. The politics of the tools exert pressure upon those

utilizing it.

Additionally, scholars in rhetoric and composition within the subfield of rhetorical genre

studies are interested in the affordances and pressures of digital tools on composition. For

instance, David R. Russell in “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory

Analysis” popularized Lev Vygotsky’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a major

part of RGS. This focused on using Vygotsky’s work on language acquisition from Mind in

Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes. He outlines three triangle points:

the subject, the object, and the mediating artifact. From this triangle comes an outcome - some

kind of learning or product (40). For writers like Russell, that mediating artifact is a technology.

The CHAT framework became so popular that, within composition studies, the two are deeply

intertwined. In fact, when Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell edited Writing Selves/Writing

Societies: Research From Activity Perspectives, a large portion of the included chapters were

written by genre theorists, about activity theory in genre.

I see these conversations in both visual culture and rhetoric and composition as deeply

intertwined, especially when thinking about memes, which by their nature traverse various

modes of composition and demand the kind of thinking Alexander and Rhodes champion in On

Multimodality.

Both fields are in agreement: technology shapes aesthetic and rhetorical practices. In

meme creation, this manifests in a variety of ways - it can affect where communities cohere, how

they compose and circulate in different platforms, and how platforms shape the continued

evolution of meme genres over time. It is this continued evolution that can help composition

better understand the role of platforms in community literacy practices. The biological metaphor

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is apt. Meme genres not only morph over time, but branch, become entirely new genres, wither

and go extinct - and, as with all rhizomatic, queer writing, they do all this while remaining

connected to a history of genres and communities of people.

This pressure of the social world on the aesthetic is also, as WJT Mitchell points out in

“Showing Seeing”, a two-way street, writing that “Visual culture is the visual construction of the

social, not just the social construction of vision” (170) These aesthetics, as my participants note

later in the chapter, also put pressure on the technologies and communities seeking to emulate

them. The iterative process of pressures causes aesthetics, communities, and platforms to be

constantly evolving - not a far cry from Vygotsky’s triangle of language acquisition. The same

way a mediating artifact, a subject, and a motive result in the outcome of a piece of written

communication, so too do communities, aesthetics, and platforms result in community literacy

acts for my participants.

Figure 9: Vygotsky’s triangle (1978) compared to the similar pressures for acts of community

literacies.

People involved in meme communities nearly always think about these influences when

composing and consuming content. In fact, overwhelmingly, my participants not only mentioned

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platforms as having different kinds of memes, but that they specifically curated their online

presence and interactions to these different spaces and experiences of community literacy. For

instance, when asked if memes were siloed to a particular social media platform, participants

showed complex rhetorical awareness of the affordances, audiences, and languages of different

platforms. Katie said,

Yeah, I think that it might just be the perception that each social media site group of users

has about the others. I think there's a pretty big difference from people who are

exclusively on Tumblr and exclusively on Facebook, for example. I think there's a

slightly different language that you would use on Tumblr than Facebook. I think what

ends up on Facebook is the more widely related content. Tumblr can be super specific.

So, I think to an extent they're able to communicate, but it's not ... it's like speaking

different dialects of English I would say.

This kind of answer shows a deep awareness of the entangled nature of platforms, which

may have different audiences and “dialects” of community literacy, but might share community

members and some amount of community literacy understanding. In fact, when talking about

their personal curation practices, participants nearly universally describe choosing platforms as

part of the process - often with an acknowledgement that different platforms came with different

experiences.

As mentioned in the methodology, this project started out by viewing each different

website as a discrete research site, and I had planned to pick the three most popular from

interviews for individual case studies. However, I have discovered that this would significantly

flatten an aspect of platforms that I think is vital to understanding the function of community

literacy online. Different websites function not as discrete platforms, but as a set social functions

that varies for each user but is determined by aspects like interfaces, available user communities,

and relationship and discussion mechanisms available. Users utilize platforms to fulfill a variety

of these social functions for themselves based on individual preferences and social needs.

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For instance, one user might choose to use tumblr for fandom content and the heavily

text-based and curatorial interface functions. Another might use it instead to “scream into the

void” essentially allowing them to write as if speaking to a community, but in a low-stakes

environment where it cannot return back to their real life community. This, for instance, is useful

for a user who may live in a homophobic home, but who still wants to interact with and

participate in the community literacy practices of the queer community. A user might avoid

certain platforms and sites if they don’t enjoy an aspect that others pursue it for. Instagram, for

instance, might be passed over for its heavily visual platform, while others who enjoy taking in

heavily visual content might participate in Instagram and Tik Tok specifically for those

interface-based reasons. Some might also be home to certain community groups a user enjoys.

For instance, a fair amount of interviewees were in the kink or polyamorous communities. When

tumblr began to censor sexual content, many of these users migrated to other websites, since

tumblr, once a haven for that social need, now no longer fulfilled it. With censorship on the rise

on Twitter after Elon Musk took over in 2022 and tumblr changing its sexual content policies

again, the landscape of platforms, aesthetics, and social needs of communities once again shifted.

As a result, it was flattening to classify memes and their practices by site, when users

came to sites for such different social purposes. These different social purposes and the different

individual personalities created very different kinds of community literacy practices. Instead,

looking to the user themselves became a more useful way of understanding how and why they

interacted in certain ways on certain platforms. A user utilizing Instagram to disconnect from a

tumultuous world and distract themselves interacts with content very differently than someone

on Twitter dealing with the same feelings about the world through void screaming behaviors.

Someone who prefers content-curation style platforms interacts with those platforms differently

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than people who prefer platforms with heavy chat functionalities. All of these affect the ways

memes are used as part of the queer community literacy.

It is useful to unpack this in a way that shows the complex relationship between users,

communities, platforms, and aesthetics. This relationship shows us the depth of the rhetorical

situation for memes, and helps us understand how they move and evolve. For the remainder of

this chapter I will trace a meme aesthetic that diverged across platforms and communities into

two very different aesthetics, used by users for different social purposes within those

communities. I will start at the root, the “other girls vs. me” meme, and show its connection to

both bimbocore and vaporwave queer aesthetics. Bimbocore focuses on hyperfeminine aesthetics

alongside leftist sentiments, while vaporwave focuses on nostalgic cyper-space aesthetics

alongside those same leftist sentiments. Both aesthetics use the grammar of queer camp in

different ways to do similar rhetorical work, and for both, the platform and the community are

two significant factors in the development of the aesthetic.

The Root

Perhaps my favorite questions to ask participants were what memes they like, or that their

communities respond well to. This helps me understand so much about that community’s literacy

- what a successful genre is for them, what their community values, what they consider fun.

When I asked Hope what content her meme groups bond over, she responded

One of my favorite memes that I know my partners and my queer friends really enjoy are

those, you know how in mainstream culture there are memes that are like, "Most girls

blah blah blah blah, but I'm different and I do X, Y, and Z"? It usually has a picture of a

skinny blond woman in pink and someone either dressing in a hoodie and jeans or goth

clothes or something. My favorite are the remixing of those where they draw them as a

couple and it's like girlfriends now. It makes them a lesbian couple. I've only ever seen

positive responses to those because they're just heartwarming and feel-good.

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Hope here is referencing what is already an iteration of an existing, often misogynistic

meme.

In the original, there is a comparison between “other girls” and “me” where other girls

are portrayed as vain, superficial, artificial, and otherwise denigratable compared to the “me”

character, who is listed as “real” or “natural,” intellectual, nerdy, and otherwise “not like other

girls.”

Figure 10: Me Vs. Other Girls meme from Tubmlr.

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme10

This original meme, according to meme-history wiki Know Your Meme, was started

around 2012. As noted elsewhere, memes with these kinds of oppressive ideals are often

reclaimed by marginalized people to re-mark their meaning. In this case, the traditional “bimbo”-

esque “other girls” becomes a marker for high-femme queer aesthetics, with the “me” character

standing in for butch aesthetics. The text of wearing makeup or caring about hair and clothes for

the femme character then shifts from a mockery of vanity to words of admiration - often

accompanied by text where it mentions they are beautiful, and with the text alongside the butch

character expressing queer desire. Often, either within the meme or as an accompanying

comment by the poster, there will be text that mentions these two are girlfriends or in love. For

example, an iteration of this image contains the “fake” girl (sometimes referred to as Other Girls-

Senpai) confessing to the “normal” girl (sometimes referred to as Normal-chan) that her “boobs

are fake, but [her] love for [Normal-chan] is real.”

This is an example of countermemeing as

The original was posted as a satire of these ideas, but what often mistakenly read sincerely and then criticized.

The use of Japanese honorific endings to make names out of the girl’s descriptions is likely a result of the

significant amount of anime and manga fandom on tumblr, the site where the meme originated.

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described first by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear in “Online Memes, Affinities, and

Cultural Production” and later outlined as a memetic rhetorical technique by Derek Sparby in

Memetic Rhetorics.

Figure 11: Fan art meme of Other Girls- Senpai and Normal-Chan depicting them as romantic

interests

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme11

Now, instead of misogyny, the meme embraces multiple queer aesthetics. It moves from

women policing other women to enforce patriarchal ideals to allying queer women together,

portraying them as partners instead of rivals for male affection.

The original meme is from tumblr, which has a history of transgressive politics but also

has exhibited plenty of conservative or repressive ideas over the years. When it came to

platforms, Hope has mentioned that she had stopped using tumblr as much since the adult

content ban, and now mainly used Instagram and Facebook for memes. It is worth noting that it

is extremely common for some sites to get memes from specific other sites - in this case, one can

see the common pipeline of tumblr memes and their later evolutions to Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter, like tumblr, is often also reposted onto these sites. Overall, different platforms and

communities will have different responses to, for instance, misogynistic memes, and those

responses will change and evolve over time, in different places.

This example meme acts as a kind of rootstock for our meme rhizome, and leads us to our

first aesthetic branch.

The BimboCore Branch

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How does one move from the queer reimagining of a misogynistic meme to communist

bimbocore? It happens via an evolution over time to help suit the politics and social actions of a

community. Bimbocore derives from the real-world experiences associated with the original

misogynistic meme - that is, it derives as a reaction to the denigration of the hyperfeminine

stupid, vain, and narcissistic. It seeks, much like its root meme, to subvert some of this aesthetic.

So what, exactly, is bimbocore as an aesthetic? It seeks visual maximalism, often bright,

sometimes glittery, usually pink. It will be filled with early 2000s pop culture images, like pink

Razor cell phones, Juicy Couture, and Bratz dolls.

Note the parallels between the aesthetic

bimbocore uses and the aesthetic traits associated with the “other girls” in the earlier meme - it is

no accident that they both bring to mind images of Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Lindsey

Lohan in their heydays. It is the messy, sparkling, pink precursor to the Kardashians - it was the

dominant visual signifier of the hyperfeminine. The focus on this now-dated aesthetic is two-

fold. Like fashion, visual aesthetics often cycle back, and the 90s and early 2000s are currently

gaining rapid popularity. The other, more interesting reason, is the association of bimbocore with

hyperfeminine girlhood - which may be why it is so popular with some queer people, and

especially some trans women.

Lilly from Chapter 2 gives a good explanation for the association between bimbocore and

trans women while explaining UwU culture:

Yeah, all that cute posting from like 2006, 2007, 2008. Just comes undone. I think part of

that is like a lot of us trans women were like growing up as a guy in that era and like, we

The hyperfeminine here is used to denote an aesthetic infused with femininity that society deems in excess of

what is acceptable. That is, one is allowed to be a certain amount of feminine, but never overly feminine. These

boundaries of needing to be feminine but not too feminine stem from patriarchal need for control over women and

their modes of expression, and the arbitrary nature of feminine vs hyperfeminine highlights that it is a mechanism

for control that can be modified at any time to exert that control.

Bimbocore as an aesthetic term differs slightly from its use as a music term, where it is associated with metal. It is

similarly subversive, pink, and queer, but the specifics of the term differ slightly in the musical usage and are less

associated with 2000s pop culture. The music styles associated more closely with the bimbocore aesthetic are

slutpop or hyperpop.

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can't be cute, because we're boys, and now we're like, "Well, that was wrong." So we can

be cute, so we're going to be cute. And it's really emotionally gratifying to pat someone's

head and be like, "You're adorable, OwO." Or have your head pat be called adorable,

OwO.

Essentially, what Lilly notes here is that many trans women who are currently adults were denied

a trans girlhood - and thus desire the same aesthetic the earlier tumblr meme reviled. The very

femininity the initial “me” in the meme rejects in the femininity those particular trans women

wanted. To reclaim that now as their own to embrace is, as Lilly notes, emotionally gratifying for

these women.

So, bimbocore focuses on a Barbie-chic, colorful, nostalgic aesthetic, and as such many

queer women, especially trans women, like its association with a positive depiction of

hyperfemininity. The subversive nature of the aesthetic does not end there when it comes to

queer memes. Take, for instance, a page like Elle Woods-Core and the Delta Nuniverse on

Facebook.

Focused on Elle Woods, star of 2001 movie Legally Blonde, this page uses the

bimbocore aesthetic to create communist and antifascist meme content, which is regularly

reposted on other popular queer meme groups.

Her January 29, 2022 meme, for instance,

features a Barbie in a pink skirt and jean jacket posing over a colorful background. In the classic

pink and white Barbie font, it reads: “CAPITALISM is a DEATH CULT we must DESTROY

before it kills us.” It also mentions in a comment that the background was provided by

Hologender, another queer leftist creator.

Figure 12: Bimbocore meme about destroying capitalism from the Elle Woods-core and the

Delta Nuniverse Facebook page.

She also has a Twitter and Instagram for this content, but Facebook is her largest audience.

On Facebook, pages are for entities to post their own content and lack a community chat, whereas groups allow

for the reposting of page content, the posting of original content, as well as having community chat functions.

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https://tinyurl.com/queermeme12

The juxtaposition between the lighthearted bright imagery and the destructive, political

nature of the text is what renders it meme-ish and funny. It is this sort of association of

bimbocore with queerness, leftism, sexual liberation, etc that moves the subversive nature of the

aesthetic further. It is not uncommon for bimbocore content creators, like Chrissy Chlapeka on

TikTok, to espouse similar sentiments. One of her pinned videos explain that a gen-z bimbo like

her is “a radical leftist, pro sex work, pro black lives matter, pro LGBTQ, pro-choice, and will

always be there for her girls, gays, and theys.”

Bimbocore, then, has evolved in reaction to misogyny and queerphobia, especially

transphobia. Over time, memes utilizing the signifiers of femininity to degrade women were

reclaimed to instead celebrate queerness, femininity, and allyship between women. This

eventually evolved into those same markers of high femininity becoming what bimbocore is

today - a way to express leftist ideals through hyperfeminine aesthetics applied to memes. These

creators leverage the platforms to circulate these aesthetics, and the affordances of these

platforms then shape the aesthetic as it evolves

For example, a Facebook page like Elle Woods-core allows a centralized place for an

individual to curate a personal aesthetic that they associate with their ideals. Facebook then

allows other pages to share these curated bits of original content while maintaining the links to

the original page. More dispersed sites, like Reddit, do not have individual pages where content

can be re-shared and instead focus on a forum-like model, making it more difficult to curate a

personal aesthetic via original content, since it would always be mixed in with the content of

others. Platforms like Tik Tok focus on the personal by focusing on the embodied self. The vast

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majority of creators like Chlapeka are recognizable by their own voice and self being part of the

content, allowing a kind of association that is not seen on other platforms, where making a meme

of one’s self would be very unusual.

This aesthetic migrated from Tumblr to Facebook (after of course being a real-life

aesthetic in the past), aligning with both the age and demographic shifts over time. Those who

were young in the 90s and early 2000s would have been on Tumblr as teenagers in its heyday.

Katie notes this when she describes Facebook versus Tumblr as platforms, saying that

Facebook, I think, is the one that's probably most widely used by different age

demographics, and that you can make your own posts. Those can be just text, they can

have photos, video, whatever you want there. People can react to things with different

emoticons. It's not really a share-y site, I would say so much, it's more of a community

thing. Tumblr is really, I would say, probably teens to 30s would be the predominant

group that uses that site. It's way more liberal, I would say, than any other site that you

would be on. It is a blogging site, so you can decide who you follow, and you can kind of

set up your own world there. That one is many sharing jokes and videos, some political

stuff

Tumblr as a platform values curatorial abilities, as it is a blogging and content sharing

focused platform. Many users associated it with anonymity, since unlike sites like Facebook and

Instagram it neither requires nor encourages people to use their real name or identity. It is also

associated with liberal and leftist ideas, making it an ideal platform for reclaimed memes, written

in rebuttal as demonstrated with the rise of response memes to the original root meme. Over

time, users shift over to Facebook as they age out of the Tumblr demographic, but they retain

their community literacies around using memes for expressing their ideas, as well as their

aesthetic tastes - especially since Tumblr as a platform is well-suited for images and visual

curation.

Of course, no aesthetic is singular in its expression, and later in this chapter I will discuss what

happens when these genres of meme reach a rhetorical escape velocity, and the ways that this

comes to affect the communities that use them.

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If Tumblr values curation and centers on younger users, Facebook values community and

older users. It is worth noting that Tumblr’s anonymity allows young queer people to explore

their identity even if they are not yet “out.” Facebook, however, requires real names for profiles,

and pages like Elle Wood-core only circumvent this by distributing their content through “pages”

instead of profiles. This focus on pages and profiles vs. blogs with curations of many user’s

content allows for a user to refine an aesthetic within their own content. This organization and

regimentation has its drawbacks, but the focus on individual user content is one of the platform

features that allows the bimbocore meme aesthetic to grow enough to be a solid genre associated

with certain kinds of writing and thinking.

When I discuss the solidifying of a genre, I am specifically referencing Catherine

Schryer’s concept from “The Lab Vs. The Clinic” where she writes that genres are “Stabilized-

for-now or stabilized enough sites of social and ideological action" (107). She expands on this

concept in “Genre Time/Space: Chronotopic Strategies in the Experimental Article,” where she

unpacks the relationship of genre to time. When I mention a solid genre, what I mean is a genre

that, at the moment in time it was being posted and circulated, would be recognized as a meme

genre. It would have recognizable features and enact a recognizable social action when used. A

meme genre that is still in the process of solidifying might lack the recognizability of a solidified

meme, and requires the audience to do extra decoding work to unpack the meaning fully. It is

with time and circulation that memes gain this recognizability and stabilize as a genre.

Facebook’s ability to share content from pages into private queer meme groups also helps

circulate and solidify the meme genre within the community, especially as a given page and

aesthetic grows in popularity and goes viral within the queer meme groups. The groups, usually

private or secret, allow even closeted queer people to engage with queer content in these parts of

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Facebook, and allow for the cultivation of more radical politics that might be harder to express in

more public parts of the platform.

The platforms it grew from and branched to are part of how the aesthetic came to thrive.

This aesthetic, and the memes that used and grew it, stabilized as a genre enough to begin to be

seen on other platforms - including Tik Toks like Chrissy Chlapeka. Platform alone, though,

can’t grow a community genre. There, of course, have to be social needs and values that

individual members want to express that coalesce on these platforms. In the case of Bimbocore,

it flowered through the social needs of queer and especially trans women who, as they grew

older, wanted to reclaim femininity, girlhood aesthetics, and explore their own leftist politics on

new platforms through a literacy they had developed from their youth - memes.

The Vaporwave Branch

Like trees, a meme root can sprout many branches. And indeed, changes in platform and

in community writing needs shift what aesthetics and memes evolve from a root. Like

bimbocore, vaporwave grew from the same rhizomatic rootstock memes like the “other girls vs

me” meme I described. But the way it evolved left it with a distinct and different aesthetic and

different social uses within queer meme communities.

Vaporwave has a much longer, and much more well-documented history than

Bimbocore. For instance, while Elle Woods-core has existed since 2019, Esquire had profiles on

the death of Vaporwave in 2016. And while Bimbocore evolved into various kinds of music,

Vaporwave evolved from it, with the musical genre able to be traced back into the 80s and

tightly wound into the aesthetic. Vaporwave is, in many ways, the film negative of bimbocore.

The color palette is pixelated instead of glitter, blue and black instead of pink and white and,

importantly, a rejection of the aesthetic it references instead of an embrace. Bimbocore makes

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itself countercultural by embracing a hyperfeminine aesthetic that had been previously seen as

vapid and vain and uplifting it. Vaporwave makes itself countercultural by adopting the aesthetic

it wants to critique. As Esquire notes, “although it might mimic the aesthetics of capitalism, the

anti-place of the American mall… it has more in common with punk. It's political. Its first

priority isn't making the charts; in fact, its identity is bound up in resisting commercial success,

in mocking it.” That is exactly the aesthetic, first musically and then visually, that vaporwave

seeks to mock - the commercialized 80s and 90s, with patterns seen on arcade carpets and bus

seats. Glitches, clip art, and cyberspace all feature heavily.

Bimbocore is about sincerity - about how the feminine mocked as bad was never really

bad, and can instead be a powerful way to express anti-capitalist ideas and support marginalized

groups. Vaporwave does just the opposite. It seeks to highlight that what was sold as a

commercial utopia, an American dream, was actually dystopia all along. With this long history

and its punk associations, vaporwave is a popular meme aesthetic among queer creators,

spanning a wide variety of genres and iterations. Bimbocore evolved on platforms like tumblr

and Facebook in response to misogyny within those platforms, and was refined by specific users

and pages on those platforms. Vaporwave’s aesthetic is not as tied to a given social media

platform, but instead to meme composition platforms, where the image is made and then

uploaded to various sites.

Avery provides us with a classic example, saying that “an example would be the heteros

are upseteros meme where you got that vaporwave background and then like the WordArt.” This

meme circulates widely, often as a reaction to heterosexuals being upset by queer culture. The

template Avery references is on most meme generators, labeled as retro wave or vaporwave for

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their search functions. Photofunia has an image generator that remains popular for this specific

format, which it has labeled retro wave.

Figure 13: Vaporwave “The Heteros are upseteros” meme

https://tinyurl.com/queermeme13

The background always features purple and blue with stars and a white grid outline in the

bottom half, as well as various arrangements of triangles. Because of its popularity on meme and

image generators, this is a widely used vaporwave format - perhaps the most widely used. The

WordArt style text, in this case showcases the disaffected response of queer people to

heteronormativity. The association of vaporwave aesthetics with those of mass commercial

culture make the countercultural tones even stronger - a way of saying “this is ours now.” I

describe this phenomenon as “oppositional citation” (DeCamp 2022). Here, not only do

marginalized groups like queer people oppositional cite the aesthetics of mass capitalism, they at

the same time decry it, making memes that stand in opposition to mass culture like capitalism

and heteronormativity. The playful rhyming of “upseteros” to “heteros” adds to the feeling that

the meme genre is meant to have a mocking air.

It is this aspect of aesthetic play that marks both vaporwave and bimbocore as branches

grown from earlier meme legacies. Both are also more labor intensive than many other meme

formats. While the vaporwave meme generator is popular across many platforms due to the ease

of creation, that is far from the only vaporwave meme, and while the most used, also the least

labor intensive. Stac outlines for us what another vaporwave meme might look like, saying that

“unless an abstract meme is like, I don't know, someone's just like blurred a picture of the Mai

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Lai Massacre and put like vapor wave aesthetic over it, and then made some comment about U.S.

Imperialism and looking up whatever. For the most part, those don't translate well.”

When Stac

mentions not translating, she is talking about platforms, having mentioned earlier that “The only

[memes] that I would say don't permeate well is the very abstract memes that I find on Facebook

sometimes.” There are two important takeaways from Stac here: first, that vaporwave often

includes strange, niche memes which are not made in a meme generator, and that these niche

memes are found on specific platforms and do not translate well into other platforms.

This aspect of labor-intensive or hand-madeness applies to bimbocore as well - none of

Elle Woods-core’s memes are made using a meme generator with pre-set backgrounds. And, as

Stac notes, this often means they do not circulate well on other sites, with Elle Woods-core

having ten times the followers on Facebook that she does on Twitter. This aspect of hand-

madeness is also part of the “play” of vaporwave and what marks it as an evolution and branch

of earlier meme cultures. That is - both branches, despite the significant difference in aesthetic

and tone, are campy.

Camp focuses on over-the-top visual absurdities, excess of performance, and a joking

nature. Cultural anthropologist Esther Newton, in the chapter “Role Models,” originally printed

in 1972, outlines what this rule set of camp may consist of, writing that “the three [themes] that

seemed most recurrent and characteristic to me were incongruity, theatricality, and humor...

Incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy” (103).

Camp for my purposes will be the grammar of excess and theatricality in the face of the absurd.

That absurdity may manifest in irreverence toward authorities or toward everyday social

This particular meme is highly specific, not of an easily reproduced or remixed genre, and likely circulated only

in the closed community Stac was discussing. I was unable to find a suitable representation. As a result, a figure is

not provided here.

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structures of gender and sexuality, and in some cases, it is even irreverent toward death, as we

see with the Mai Lai Massacre meme. Though the meme does not mock the massacre victims, it

does utilize irreverent humor in the face of death as part of its strategy to critique imperialism.

Camp, though, is always sincere. It is teasing but not mocking. In fact, it often uses its excess

and irreverence to embrace something - in this case to embrace anti-imperial sentiments. The

queerness is in camp’s refusal to bend to normative social structures. If camp was merely to tease

or to embrace, it would not be queer. However, in its use of theatricality and excess to do both, it

becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Many queer memes embrace camp as part

of their visual-textual rhetoric, and many (even non-queer) memes are campy. The meme-ish

way of thinking, the teasing nature and interest in excess, shares a lot of overlap with camp.

Camp is when one teases and embraces something, utilizing a joyful or humorous excess.

Rejecting the norm via excess is, in the grammar of camp, meant to be fun. However, camp is

also about anger and death. Camp is a responsive aesthetic. It can utilize its excess, its humor, its

spectacle as a way of coping with the specter of death in the queer experience. As film scholar

Caryl Flinn notes in her 1995 article “The Deaths of Camp,” camp ties closely to death and

decay (434). It is a response to the constant threats to the queer body posed by hate crimes, the

AIDS crisis, and other harms. When the threat of death and decay is constant and overwhelming,

as it is within the queer experience, one way to cope with the despair is to laugh about it - a kind

of gallows humor. Even with its focus on fun, excess, and spectacle, camp is also about an

expression of anger at the ever-looming threat to queer life. Camp is an aesthetic response to the

constant mortal threat to the queer body.

Perhaps this is why it feels like meme culture is such a large part of queer youth culture today - a way for new

generations to embrace camp!

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Still, while I use this framework, camp is a slippery term. Queer and camp theorist Fabio

Cleto’s 1999 collection Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader–which

includes foundational essays like famed writer and critic Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on

‘Camp’”–provides insight into the many ways of defining camp. Sontag, for instance, mentions

that “camp” is, in a way, unknowable or untraceable - she writes that to speak of it is to betray it.

She also describes it as a kind of sensibility (Sontag 53). While many of the authors in the

collection disagree with Sontag on her notion of what camp may be, the idea of camp as a

sensibility is appealing. Indeed, camp does not cohere as a unified aesthetic despite the title of

the volume. Instead it acts almost as a kind of sensory grammar, a set of rules around which

artists improvise an aesthetic. Sontag put it this way: “It is one way of seeing the world as an

aesthetic phenomenon” (54). For memes, this ties back into the idea that memes are as much

about a viewer’s reaction and feelings about a meme as they are about any particular aesthetic

choices. The meme, like camp, is a sensibility, and often, these sensibilities share significant

overlap. The meme wants the viewer to see it meme-ishly, not as something more formal or

cleaner, and is willing to perform that aesthetic in an over-the-top manner so the viewer cannot

mistake it for something else via these exaggerated DIY aesthetic elements.

Both bimbocore and vaporwave invoke labor that is not easily made on a meme

generator, and the visual grammar of that is clear in the artisan, singular quality of many

individual memes. This urge for DIY memes that often fit an aesthetic but are not part of a wider

genre is a community seeking a camp aesthetic to express queer rage at the systems that oppress

them - facilitated by different platforms and cultural moments. For instance, the core meme was

reclaimed directly by using reproductions of the original work. The hand-madeness evolved

later, on Facebook, with its older users and their access to better image processing technology.

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What is important to note is that no meme is easily tied to any single platform, either for

composition or distribution. Some may be more popular, but none of this rhetorical work is

singular. In Jacob D. Richter’s “Network-Emergent Rhetorical Invention” he outlines the

complex ways technology, community, and rhetors come together, writing that “Social media

environments reflect a similar reality: humans do not act alone, but act with an array of forces

that come together to contribute to an emergent inventive act. Multiple actants contribute,

participate, and assemble the resulting invention. Agencies forming a network converge and

contribute to the resulting action, which is always a shared emergence in which no single actant

works alone.” We see this too with Vaporwave and Bimbocore - both are examples of

multimodal, network-emergent rhetorical invention. They are not the result of a single platform

or user but instead a multitude of forces across technology, audience, composer, and rhetorical

situations.

I think of these influences like the air or rain that nourishes a plant. Here, the air and rain

include a large number of queer meme community members and their many influences and

personalities, and the branches go in different directions much the way real plants do. They grow

to gather resources to nourish the plant, and that requires a multitude of branches to help gather

enough. In many ways, these are not pure evolutions of the original meme - they did not come

directly in response to the original. They are like grafted branches - taken from elsewhere to

grow fruit while being nourished by the root.

The point of these plant metaphors is that genre ecologies of memes are like real

ecologies - incredibly complex in a way that makes tracing and even metaphor difficult.

However, it helps bring home the main point. Vaporwave and Bimbocore are camp aesthetics

used by queer meme makers to do similar kinds of work in different rhetorical ways, and both

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can trace an influence through a long history of meme culture. And within all this, both platform

and community are what cause this growth into different visual grammars to accomplish their

social action through composition.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that memes can sometimes reach a kind of rhetorical

escape velocity, and I want to expand on that now. Bimbocore and Vaporwave are not singular in

their expression online, nor are they exclusive to queer meme communities. Their roots tangle,

stretch outward, their branches flower and wither in unexpected ways. Sometimes, they bear fruit

that falls far afield from the plant it grows from.

Jim Ridolfo and Dánielle Nicole DeVoss develop the concept of rhetorical velocity in

their article “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” They describe it

as “the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be

recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short- or

long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician.” Rhetorical escape velocity builds off of

rhetorical velocity. If rhetorical velocity considers timing, possible uptakes, and audience

responses to a piece, rhetorical escape velocity is what happens in the spaces between. What

happens when an aesthetic is separated from the communities and the meanings they imbue?

What happens when interlopers uptake community literacy practices? That is when a

composition or a genre hits its rhetorical escape velocity. It is now outside the realm of its

original rhetorical velocity. It is at this escape velocity that the evacuation of meaning occurs, as

we saw in chapter 3. Both neutral interlopers and bad-faith actors can pick up on compositions

and genres for their own purposes, sometimes twisting words into misinformation or

masquerading as part of a community but using the community's literacy practices to do harm.

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While an original composer’s rhetorical velocity might include them predicting it would go viral,

the life beyond that virality is where it hits the rhetorical escape velocity - where it is out of the

original orbit.

Take, for instance, the rise of Fashwave as an example of bad-faith actors.

This aesthetic is chronicled in “This is Fashwave, the Suicidal Retro-futurist Art of the

Alt-right” by Jack Smith IV. He writes that it “amounts to a racist clone of vaporwave, the visual

and musical aesthetic born on the internet in the early end of this decade.” They also note that

“Vaporwave and fashwave both play in the ruins of modern consumerism. And both genres force

us to consider how much we have lost so quickly.” These memes use vaporwave aesthetics, like

glitchy neon backgrounds, and overlay them with Greek statues to represent “Western tradition,”

alongside text about “protecting heritage” and other fascist and white nationalist catch phrases.

How does an aesthetic style all about critiquing oppressive power structures like capitalism and

heteronormativity become a fascist propaganda style? Smith notes that fascists have a long

history of this kind of bad-faith uptake of a style, reaching back into punk and Nazi propaganda.

Bad faith actors will nearly always try to uptake certain composition choices in an attempt to

blend in, or become trendy. It is a way of glamorizing their ideals as cool and countercultural. It

also helps white nationalists evacuate meaning from countercultural composition practices that

might have been used to combat their fascist ideals.

This fascist uptake of meme composition is not the only way meme genres and aesthetics

hit their rhetorical escape velocity and become evacuated of meaning, however. Some instances

are not interested in anything as extreme as fascist propaganda branded as counterculture. Many

times, people are just jumping on a meme bandwagon, and as a result diluting the meaning of the

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aesthetic, decoupling it from its original community use. This is the same phenomenon discussed

in chapter 3: an evacuation of meaning.

We can turn to Reddit for an example of neutral interlopers: r/MemeEconomy.

Individual subreddits (and even Reddit itself) may fade eventually, but this subreddit

represents a particular kind of interaction with memes: that of the voyeur. Lurkers may not do

any composition themselves, but they still have a stake in a community, as seen in chapter 2.

Voyeurs, a kind of eavesdropping audience, on the other hand, do not have any stake in the

community. In MemeEconomy, this results is a commercialization of meme aesthetics -

including a bitcoin currency that can be earned through participating in the subreddit. In this

particular instance, the subreddit does not have any fascist propaganda to spread. Instead, they

just want to observe (and sometimes invest money in) the rise and fall of various genres and

templates, acting as sociologists or economists, testing who has the best insights. The subreddit

functions through users posting templates that they think will become popular - sometimes even

proposing templates off viral images that seem “meme-able.” Users comment their speculations

as well as their own additional humorous commentary on the meme itself.

While relatively harmless, it is clear that communities like /r/MemeEconomy are outside

the initial rhetorical velocity considerations generally made by the initial meme creators. Instead

of being viewed within the community as a way of communicating, it is being observed and

commodified from afar.

This commodification is for the consumption of the meme by

outsiders. This particular subreddit also has sway over the circulation and evolution of meme

genres and aesthetics, since it is one of the top 1% of subreddits by size and brings thousands of

views onto these meme formats.

Notably, it is not dissimilar from the way this dissertation analyzes memes from afar for outsider consumption,

though I am myself queer and not outside the community.

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Bad actors and voyeurs both can push a meme to its rhetorical escape velocity where it

moves outside of the community in ways that are unpredictable and sometimes counter to the

initial composition goals of the communities that made them. This rhetorical escape velocity is

also one of the factors that evacuates a community literacy practice of its intended meaning.

Memes and their aesthetics do not evolve in a vacuum. In digital communities like queer

meme communities, community literacy acts and the aesthetic forms they employ are shaped by

the platforms used to compose them, as well as the social forces of the communities they are

being made within. This is how forms like bimbocore and vaporwave emerge, though the

complex web of interactions between communities and the technologies their members use.

These same forces can cause these forms to spiral beyond the reach of the community.

Sometimes this is into the reach of neutral parties who nonetheless participate in the evacuation

of meaning of the form for the original community, and sometimes this is into the reach of bad

actors who want to use a once counter-cultural form for liberation to oppress the very

communities that created it. Better understanding the ways these forces coalesce helps us to

understand the relationship between an individual, their composition, their technology, and their

community.

147

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Interlude

<speaker id="Abbie"> Is there anything you would want me as a researcher to know about your

feelings about memes, your interactions with memes and meme communities that you didn't get

to say during the rest of the interview? </speaker>

I feel like I did cover it all. I feel like the main aspect of it for me is just representation and

validation, honestly. Like I talked about before, since the world is so straight-focused and media

is so straight, TV is so straight, it's nice to finally have a break from ... straight world, I guess,

and just see funny things that apply to me that I don't necessarily get to talk about with my

straight friends, per se, or that other people might not get necessarily. It's nice to see people

having similar experiences to me, or the same experience in something that I thought was

specific to me, I guess, just because I haven't had a chance to talk about it with somebody or

something like that. So yeah, it's just validating and it's nice to just have a community of people

who also do dumb shit and think dumb shit is funny, and are also gay. Yeah, I think that's the

main thing for me.

</sharedHumor></queer></meme></speaker>

151

Conclusion

I am now the 2020s version of my screen-time addled child self. I’m chronically online, a

self-declared meme queen constantly flooding the group chat with things I think will get a laugh.

My taste for memes mostly leans towards “deep-fried,” a genre interested in surrealism and

bizarre images. I love an image that unsettles - not as in violence or shock, but as in Barthes’

“punctum.” I love a meme that pierces me, that I cannot immediately make sense of but that I

feel acutely. I am not sure whether I developed this taste because I loved queer memes, which

often have this punctum, or if I loved queer memes because I already had a taste for this. In

either case, queer memes for me often possess a punctum that I do not experience with other

memes. It is also what helps a viewer identify the “thing” of the meme.

Through 32 interviews and plenty of time strolling the many meme ecologies on social

media, I sought to answer my research questions. What is a meme? (And what is a queer meme?)

How are queer communities utilizing memes in their literacy practices? How does the object of

the meme interact with spaces, places, and people? How and why do queer people use memes to

communicate? Why are memes so important to so many queer people?

I explain what a meme is both as form and as feeling. As I argue in Chapter 1, a meme is

a multimodal composition that points both outward via citation of shared cultural knowledge,

and inward via an element for audience identification. Meme is also something that feels

memeish. Something that is not a meme can become a meme, even just temporarily, if the reader

feels like interpreting it as such. This is why some things that are otherwise “viral objects” by

Limor Shifman’s definition are interpreted as memes - and why textposts and “shitposts” are

often called memes. This occurs with the “Holy fucking bingle” meme - an otherwise viral object

becomes a meme by feeling like one. When taken together, their form and feeling lend to their

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recognizability, their legibility as a metagenre. Many factors can lead to this interpretation, but

for queer memes, a viral object with just the right amount of camp or spectacle can often cross

over into feeling like a meme to their audiences.

Reading is fundamental to meme creators as we learn from three meme creators in

chapter 2. Creators and circulators must have in-depth knowledge of the current popular memes,

as well as the topics their queer community members would be interested in. Even those who

never make a meme, or who never type out a comment, still read in a way that helps form the

community. Analytics of scrolling, likes, and follows on various platforms all feed into the ways

algorithms serve content to different audiences - meaning even the most passive queer meme

lurker is shaping what others in the community see.

Chapter three looks at a different aspect of what queer memes mean to a community by

delving into how race manifests in queer meme communities. Appropriation of AAVE as “meme

slang” has been a hot topic, and these discussions and critiques help connect appropriation and

community literacy. The constant uptake of community literacy practices from QTPOC by white

queer people and eventually straight cis queer people evacuates the meaning from these literacy

practices, leaving the initial communities to have to continually rebuild meaning-making literacy

practices as a result. Race also manifested in what people would and would not tolerate in meme

groups, with many of my participants describing a kind of rhetorical not-listening, where they

leave groups they feel are perpetuating racist or transphobic ideals. QTPOC participants also

described additional ways they navigate majority white meme spaces versus more niche and

intersectional spaces.

Chapter four focuses on the ways the rhizome of a meme ecology blooms among the

different pressures of platform constraints, individual and cultural aesthetic tastes and

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movements, and community interests. Both bimbocore and vaporwave meme forms are used by

queer people to critique capitalism, but they take very tactics to do so. This is a result of interests

in different pop culture forms, different platforms for creation and circulation, and the tastes of

different subcommunities. A meme aesthetic like bimbocore is interested in reclaiming visuals

and ideas once associated with vapid femininity and used to critique women. Instead, bimbocore

embraces all the Y2K glitter and pink to make radical political statements about destroying

capitalism to create a more livable world for queer and otherwise marginalized groups. The other

side of that coin is vaporwave, which embraces the aesthetics associated with Y2K capitalism -

inspired by mall rug patterns and retro-future imaginings - to critique that same capitalism.

Among all of this I found a few major threads that reached across all these chapters.

1. Memes are both a multimodal composition with formal aspects and an affective

state.

2. Feelings are really important to memes.

3. Queer memes are a way of connecting across spaces and places – they fight

against both physical isolation from queer community and homophobic real life

and online spaces to forge connection and live authentically.

4. Queer memes are shaped by a variety of pressures, including larger cultural

trends, community histories and interests, individual aesthetic choices, and

composition capabilities across a variety of platforms.

5. Memes affect and are affected by their communities – it is iterative.

6. There’s no one way to talk about queer memes, because they are a way of

thinking, and no way of thinking is monolithic, and these communities are hugely

diverse.

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There are still places I feel there is something more to understand about queer memes.

For instance, though I created an archive of memes from across a sampling of meme

communities, I did not get to use it much or do any meaningful large-scale analysis of it. In the

future, I plan to bring in the archive more, and perhaps add a schema for this kind of analysis to

XM<LGBT/>. I also think it would be interesting to explore the life and death cycle of a meme

as a community literacy practice. This would include tracking a single meme and its iterations

the way Laurie Gries does, something my methodology was not focused on. Alongside these two

methodological expansions, I want to continue exploring and experimenting with what queer

methods and methodology can mean.

Future work can take up how to theorize what emotion, art, and creativity meant in

community literacy. A future additional chapter on affect and emotion in memes would help me

make better sense of their role in community literacy practices. This might help me better

triangulate laughter, pain, and desire, which I discuss but would like to focus more directly on.

Memes are weird. To scratch the surface of queer memes, their communities, and their

forms and functions, I had to bring together theories on visual culture, community literacy,

rhetorical genre, rhetorical identification, race, and queerness. So, what is a queer meme? There

is no one litmus test - like a pride flag, there are lots of different stripes of queer meme. What ties

them all together is a rhizome of factors and facets, including queer communities, queer self,

reading, writing, culture, and aesthetics.

Interest in memes continues to grow. For instance, the release of the Barbie move in 2023

features “This Barbie is a…” posters, which quickly became memes. This was an intentional

move on the part of the marketing team, who released a meme generator that allowed people to

make themselves (or others) into their own version of the meme easily. This kind of mass

155

production and facilitation of memes indicates the growth that memes are seeing. Still, many

responded to Barbie with more homegrown memes – including more than a few about how

Barbie is a lesbian. In fact, Barbie’s association with Bimbocore (as the Barbie in chapter four’s

meme demonstrates) has meant that the queer community has made plenty of Barbie memes in

response to the movie. The meme is on the rise. Not only is it timely to understand memes more

generally, but it is also timely for queer memes in particular. As transphobic and homophobic

sentiment continues to grow, so do digital spaces where queer people seek peace, and sometimes

find ways to resist and fight back against their marginalization. Queer memes have become a

way for queer people to find community, to laugh, and to be in the digital elsewhere and

otherwise.

156

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Appendix

Item 1: XM<LGBT/> 2.0 Schema

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<grammar

xmlns="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"

xmlns:a="http://relaxng.org/ns/compatibility/annotations/1.0"

datatypeLibrary="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes">

<start>

</oneOrMore>

</choice>

</element>

</start>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

166

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

167

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

<text/>

168

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element></define>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element>

</define>

<text/>

</choice>

</zeroOrMore>

</element></define>

</define>

169

</attribute>

</define>

<value>description</value>

<value>interaction</value>

<value>deepFried</value>

<value>mention</value>

<value>contentSource</value>

</choice>

</oneOrMore></list></attribute></define>

<value>anonymous</value>

<value>realIdentity</value>

<value>voidScreaming</value>

<value>mention</value>

<value>relationship</value>

<value>contentCuration</value>

<value>groupPages</value>

<value>followIndividuals</value>

<value>calmingContent</value>

<value>distract</value>

<value>chaoticContent</value>

<value>notWanted</value>

<value>description</value>

</choice>

</oneOrMore></list></attribute></define>

<value>identityTesting</value>

<value>intersectionality</value>

</choice>

</list></attribute></optional>

</define>

<value>personal</value>

170

<value>experience</value>

<value>sexuality</value>

<value>trauma</value>

<value>partial</value>

<value>selfReflection</value>

</choice></oneOrMore></list></attribute></define>

<value>indifferent</value>

<value>frustrated</value>

<value>upset</value>

<value>hostile</value>

<value>friendly</value>

<value>agreement</value>

<value>disagreement</value>

<value>dislike</value>

<value>comfortable</value>

<value>discomfort</value>

<value>humor</value></choice></oneOrMore></list></attribute>

</define>

</grammar>

171

Item 2: Interview base questions

Semi-structured interview - base questions

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

How old you are, what is your first language, and what are your interests?

How do you identify as a member of the LGBTAQ community?

In what areas of your life are you “out?"

Where do you choose not to disclose your identity as an LGBTAQ individual?

What are the websites where you like to view/share etc memes?

How do these different spaces work?

Can you describe how you interact with these websites?

What meme groups (even not queer) are you a part of?

On what websites do you consume the most content?

How did you get involved in meme groups?

Can you tell me a little about the specific queer meme groups you are a part of?

Do you remember how you joined those meme groups?

Why do you participate in those specific groups?

What kinds of memes do you see in your different meme groups? Do they change across groups?

Do you make, remix, or read memes? How do you interact with them?

When you interact with memes, why do you interact in that way?

What is your favorite queer meme?

Can you describe what is happening in this meme?

What is funny about this meme to you?

What are your interactions like with other members of queer meme communities?

Are there certain memes you think your groups wouldn’t understand?

Are there any memes that your queer meme groups have found controversial?

What tensions exist in your meme groups?

What content do your meme groups bond over?

What kinds of responses do memes usually get in your groups?

In what ways do you feel included in the community?

In what ways do you feel excluded in the community?

Can you walk me through the process of how you compose a meme?

How would people in your meme groups react to this meme?

What would you like me as a researcher to know that you didn’t get to say elsewhere?