Dissent by Design: A Multimodal Study of 2019 Women’s March MY Protest Signs

Abstract

The power of texts and visuals in the repertoire of protests – in both its production and consumption – allows protest movements to not only spread their message faster and mobilise support, but also promote active engagement in the public sphere. The present study examined multimodal discourse of protest by analysing textual and visual resources in protest signs used to express and negotiate feminist ideology at the 2019 Women’s March MY in Kuala Lumpur. Following Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006) and van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network (2008), three themes of the march were selected for multimodal analysis. Findings of the study show that multimodal representations through verbal and visual resources vary in its salience across different themes – where some protest signs lean more towards texts in conveying its messages with minimal visuals, others show a higher reliance on textual and visual convergence to convey meaning as well as to bait the attention of readers. Weighing in on the Malaysian feminist discourse, this study puts forth the potential of multimodal strategies through verbal and visual resources in conveying feminist messages and negotiating social change through the act of protest.