How do Internet memes speak security?

Loui Marchant

doi:10.15664/jtr.1501

Abstract

Recently, scholars have worked to widen the scope of security studies to address security silences by considering how visuals speak security and banal acts securitise. Scholarship on internet memes and their co-constitution with political discourse is also growing. This article seeks to merge this literature by engaging in a visual security analysis of ‘everyday’ memes. A bricolage-inspired method analyses the security speech of memes as manifestations, behaviours and ideals. The case study of Pepe the Frog highlights how memes are visual ‘little security nothings’ with power to speak security in complex, polysemic and ambiguous ways which can reify or challenge wider security discourse.

Highlights

Security Studies can be broadly defined as analysing “the politics of the pursuit of freedom from threat” (Buzan 2000: 2)
The section of this paper explores the existing literature on visuals, everyday security and internet memes and draws out an essential argument of this paper: that visual memes metaphorically speak both within and outside of their immediate intertextual/intervisual context in ways that text alone cannot
Theorists of the everyday have focused on how security is not exclusively produced through grand securitising speech acts, but through a greater myriad of seemingly banal acts, or ‘little security nothings’

Summary

Introduction

Security Studies can be broadly defined as analysing “the politics of the pursuit of freedom from threat” (Buzan 2000: 2). Internet memes in particular are often both visual and everyday, and as such this article will bring together existing literature by analysing how they speak security. Huysmans further brings the theory of the everyday to security analysis by exploring security practices, including data collection and CCTV surveillance, which might be considered “little security nothings” when compared to grand, existential speech acts (2011, 2015) These traditional acts of securitisation must follow certain linguistic-grammatical rules and the speaker must hold a position of power from which the act can be carried out (Williams 2003: 525). The section will draw from this literature review to present a new methodological framework for the empirical study of internet memes as everyday visual speakers of security

A Methodology of Memes

Conclusion