Thinking about Feminist Memes

by: Máiréad Casey , March 26, 2026

In the open office where I work, you will find a floor full of memes printed and pinned to people’s desks. On one desk, the now ancient meme of the ‘This is Fine’ dog stares from his burning kitchen in a way that dramatises the learned (or performed) helplessness of our neoliberal universities and political leaders alike in the face of democratic collapse. He also embodies the naive oblivion that sometimes feels necessary to keep going with a large individual research project, such as a thesis or book. Shana MacDonald’s monograph The Art of Memes Digital Culture analyses the work of memes—both how they are made in terms of artistic practice and tradition, and how they impact us as meme viewers/audiences/consumers/remixers. MacDonald’s book critically appraises feminist, queer, anticapitalist, and antiracist memes through existing models of aesthetic assessment, such as art history, performance studies, and film theory. She does this to understand how memes work to be emotionally relatable and effective, as well as to constitute a politically persuasive medium. As MacDonald explains in her Introduction, titled ‘Countercultural Aesthetics and Medium Specificity in the Digital Era,’ memes are ‘one the more direct ways to announce one’s identity or positionality to a vast audience’ (2025: 7). She compares meme-making to DIY bricolage tradition, whereby artworks are crafted by resources that are near at hand with materials that include digital images and sounds, bodies in motion, text, and editing tools. She argues that ‘Memes, regardless of their political positionality, are countercultural and build upon different forms of resistant aesthetic tactics that echo previous activist media histories’ (2025: 13).

MacDonald connects digital culture and meme-making to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Dadaism and feminist collage art from Hannah Höch to Barbara Kruger in the first chapter, titled ‘Collage, Juxtaposition, and Spatial Collapse’. MacDonald discusses memes such as @ihatekatebush’s ‘what’s in my bag’ starter pack meme. The starter pack meme is a collage of four or more images that suggests a type of person, e.g., a Fontaines DC Fan Starter Pack. @ihatekatebush has a starter pack meme with the caption ‘what’s in my bag’ with images of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower, a ‘tear-stained letter addressed to father,’ feminine stationary captioned ‘the tools to divest phallocentrism’ and Audre Lorde and Joan Didion tagged as ‘my girlfriends’ all to suggest a hyperbolic stereotype of a feminist young woman. MacDonald argues that the surreal and self-reflexive humour in the example described above and in the meme image of a hamster driving a toy car reading ‘the horrors persist but so do I’ uses fine art techniques such as juxtaposition, defamiliarisation, and paradox. These memes contribute to a particular form of address that ‘breaks the illusion of representational realism and produces an emotional distance which allows for critical formations between meme maker and viewer’ (2025: 53). This chapter poses interesting questions for the place of meme-making in the current crises of AI text generation, noting that much of the online content is prose and is the knowledge foundation of large language models and artificial intelligence (2025: 53). By contrast, ‘Memes are more closely aligned with the realm of dream logic and transgression of linguistic codes and social norms’ (2025: 53). Does the production, remixing and recontextualization of digital images according to this absurdist logic make it less comprehensible or rather, does it make it available for co-option and appropriation by artificial intelligence? The idea offers a tempting avenue for resistance reclamation of human creativity.

The Art of Memes in Feminist Digital Culture makes visible some of the inroads that leftist meme-makers have built into a medium and a visual culture that is largely considered to be dominated by right-wing internet users. The field of feminist digital media studies tends to investigate the darker and more disturbing parts of internet culture with good reason. Work led by Debbie Ging on the circulation, dissemination and influence of the memes and edgy humour in the manosphere provides invaluable insights into the reach and mainstreaming of far-right and misogynist activity online (Ging, Baele, et al. 2025, Ging, Lynn, et al 2020, Ging 2019, Ging and Siapera 2018 ). Viveca Greene’s work on the particular brand of misogynoir that racist trolls utilised in attacking Leslie Jones on (what was then referred to as) Twitter in response to her casting in the reboot of Ghostbusters articulates how ‘The logic of trolling—divisive humour, lulz seeking, victim blaming, social and symbolic violence, white supremacy and racist humour—is the very logic of a certain sector of contemporary politics, and targets Black women in particular’ (2018: 56). Similarly, work like Maja Brandt Andreason’s on memes about the sexual abuse scandals of Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, and Kevin Spacey demonstrates the cultural values and cultural logics by which rape myths are perpetuated, acts of sexual violence are trivialised and the people who experienced the violence are dehumanised and demonised (Andreasen 2023). Such work looks at the seams and structures that compose misogynist, racist, and sexually violent humour and imagery in order to dismantle and combat it.

MacDonald’s book is doing a different kind of work that looks at how feminist memes are constructed and what effect they have for creators and audiences, expressing grievances, signalling political positionalities, building communities and enabling resistance. Previous scholarship in this vein includes Rachel Kuo’s work on the catharsis and affective relief of reaction GIFs when used in response to gendered hate online (2019). Similarly, Andi Schwartz’s writing on feminist memes as a modern form of ‘bedroom culture’ whereby femmes form subcultures of cultural consumption and cultural production (2022) and ‘soft’ femme aesthetics online, articulating a mindset and a sensibility that resists neoliberal ‘hardness’ and masculinist logics (2020). Both the content that MacDonald researches (the artistic and humorous visual imagery expressing feminist viewpoints) and the resulting research (acknowledging the aesthetic and political achievements of this content) offer a respite from the misinformation and hateful AI slop-laden news landscape. It is a motivating reminder that things can change and we can be active and creative agents of that change.

The second chapter, titled ‘Reenactment, Nostalgia and Performative Ruptures,’ places memes in the context of performance studies and considers memes that have a collaborative element that recreate the intimacy of live performance as well as memes that involve nostalgic reenactment either through the body and voice of the performer or through a performing body avatar like photographs of posed dolls. She uses the example of the ‘We Riot’ memes, where a narrator begins a covert dialogue ostensibly about makeup routine or other traditionally feminine practice considered mundane or exclusionary to male audiences, then further into the dialogue changes tack ‘and now that the men have stopped listening, we riot at midnight.’ Replies to the post expand on the joke such as the user comment ‘I use a shade called RAGE’ etc., and in this way we see the spontaneity, interactivity and collaboration of performance art. This chapter also analyses the book’s cover image, a meme by Annelies Hofmeyr called Trophy Wife Barbie, where the Mattel toy is reconfigured as a fantastical and celebratory abject figure with stag horns, a bloody sword and holding a Ken doll’s severed head close like a teddy bear:

The antlers become a defamiliarising trope that cues audiences to the disconnect or dissonance between the image of Barbie upheld as a bastion of feminine ideals for sixty years and the contradictions and abjection of living under the expectations of femininity in the twenty-first century. (2025: 85)

This way, the image engages with an intertextual awareness of Barbie as an icon as well as a nostalgic material figure of girlhood that is most often manipulated and used outside of its intended context through childhood play. This cuing of nostalgia is distinct from the nostalgia utilised by neoconservative traditionalists and right-wing populists, who ‘want to go back to the ways things were in a ‘simpler’ time of gender binaries and roles but because they want to reimagine those moments in more complicated ways’ (2025: 100).

The third chapter, titled ‘Montage and the Memetic Assemblage of Attractions,’ utilises film theory to discuss zine culture and meme-making. MacDonald reconfigures film theory relating to silent-era filmmaking, such as Tom Gunning’s seminal ‘cinema of attractions’ and its discussion about early cinema’s direct form of address, as a way to conceptualise the value of meme-making as a call to action and activism. The work of zine-making shares the feminist and queer DIY aesthetic with feminist memes. They operate outside of mainstream publishing and media conglomeration, and they also have an openly subjective form of address that does not assume a position of authority but instead invites the reader’s interpretation and response. Similarly, MacDonald argues, when we share memes that reflect our own politics, ideals and identities, we are participating in a form of assembly and signalling (2025: 137). She says that like zines and experimental cinema, ‘time and space become abstracted so that in their displacement from the offline reality, we can get at other perspectives or suggested ways of seeing’ (2025: 145). In this way, memes have an aesthetic that ruptures, resonates, and replicates in audiences’ minds long after the first encounter.

The final chapter, titled ‘Embracing the Pleasure Activism of Joyscrolling,’ looks at the worldmaking and resilience-building possibilities of meme-making. This final chapter hammers home the mission statement of MacDonald’s book. MacDonald performs close readings of Bernie Sanders’ Mittens memes (where a picture of the Vermont US senator seated at Joe Biden’s inauguration wearing a face mask and patterned mittens is cropped into different historical and fictional scenarios) and curated Instagram carousels of stills of the 1990s anime series Sailor Moon with user-created affirmations as captions (e.g., ‘how do we get through this?’ captioning a anime cartoon cat looking wistful and the answer ‘together’ captioning an image of the cat being tearfully embraced). MacDonald highlights ‘contemporary activism’s embrace of pleasure, joy, and connection as a necessary part of resistance’ (2025: 154). There are two sides to this coin. The first is the inspiration and motivation for teachers and creative practitioners being called to create joyful, pleasurable, and funny activist art. The second side is a healthy scepticism and vigilance of the things that are important to keep in mind when intending to make art and assemble a community online. First is the practice on platforms where dizzying profits are made from our attention while collecting and selling data of users and simultaneously censoring, removing and shadow-banning content that is threatening to the ideologies of their shareholders. Does the art of meme-making need to be a moving target of work that inevitably becomes appropriated and absorbed by big tech companies, as we see that activists need to keep changing and coding their posts in order to avoid such censorship (e.g., speaking critically about other acronyms instead of typing ‘IDF’ when describing Israeli war crimes)? MacDonald suggests that working through Instagram, TikTok and similar platforms ‘suspends the everyday structures of an internet designed to be unwelcoming to women and queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and racialised communities and offers forms of parody that playfully liberate viewers from the established order of masculinist media’ (2025: 163). She posits that platforms that generate most of their profit through outrage and misinformation are being used against that purpose. Although the argument is convincing, I would like to see further interdisciplinary explorations of the subject in digital media studies, digital humanities, sociology, psychology, political science and computer science to investigate the infrastructures of these platforms and their impact on the dissemination of queer, feminist and anti-racist pedagogy. In practical terms, I know that these are the ways in which their art and their message can be easily seen and disseminated, so are my critiques of the platform as impractical and unhelpful as avoiding public life altogether? These questions offer fertile ground for future study and praxis and suggest that, much like the collage art MacDonald describes, this book borrows and recontextualises theories of aesthetic practice and appraisal to create something new.