Women’s mimimi in memes: referential processes, stereotyping and re-enunciation

Abstract

The posts exchanged in digital network demonstrate a multi-interaction and project a profitable sharing of information, opinions, new discursive genres and communication protocols. This is the case of meme, an emerging digital genre that quickly gains expressive power and communicational capacity. Precisely because of its "replicating" character, by repeating, totally or partially, what was said and / or the saying to express something new and to leave on the surface its imitative-transforming character, it represents, explicitly, the dialogism that pervades every statement. From the configuration of memes characterized as "mimimi", that is, of insistently questioning content, more specifically those that focus on the representation of women, we intend to analyze how a stereotype is fabricated, assuming that there are initially prototypical social representations with the potential to be generalized. In this analysis, we highlight the re-enunciation of fixed formulas, so commonly used in memes, in a visible process of intertextuality / intericonicity shared, especially, by netizens, as a factor for the reorganization of certain social representations. From a set of memes created around the "beautiful, demure and domestic" maxim, initially used by Veja magazine in April 2016, in the description of Marcela Temer, "first lady", this work intends to analyze the verbal-visual referential process in these statements, markedly stereotyped, as a communicative and axiological resource related to femininity. The theoretical basis for the analysis will be centered in the Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse Analysis, in the interface with Textual Linguistics, with Theory of Social Representations, with Semiology and as a contribution related to re-enunciation.