NARRATIVE BUILDING THROUGH MEMES ON RAPE AND HARASSMENT VICTIMS: A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The social media memes on rape and harassment victim in Pakistan create verbal and semiotic sexual violence for the victims along with their online supporters. Online misogyny is online abuse against women and girls that is rooted in a hatred and mistrust of women which seeks to silence the victims of rape and harassment, further reinforce gender inequalities. This research explored the role of linguistic and semiotic choices made by social media users to create social media memes serving victim blaming, victim silencing and revealing the diseased cognitive structures of such netizens (internet users) in the virtual world. The research is based on five social media memes on the most talked about cases of rape and harassment in the online world. The researcher selected those rape and harassment cases on which there were at least 25-50 memes. The present study data was taken from Facebook and Twitter in the form of screen shots of the memes. The data was analyzed at two level Micro-Discourse Analysis and Macro-Discourse Analysis. The research findings explored the triangular relationship between linguistic, social and cognitive structures. Thus, the social media memes revealed the cognitive structures of the meme creators through their linguistic as well as semiotic choices.