The playful politics of memes

Abstract

This special issue emphasizes memes as an avenue for researching vernacular expressions of the political. Memes disrupt and reimagine politics in humorous ways. Spreading across platforms, they confirm, contest and challenge political power and hierarchies. In this introduction, we contend that playfulness connects the humorous and the political in memes. While memes may be created to disrupt, challenge, and reimagine politics in a humorous way, we argue for a critical examination of how they playfully demarcate and move frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the political. Memes constitute a playful activity that follows a shared set of rules and gives a (shared) voice, which may create togetherness and political identities but also increase polarization. As their template travels, memes continue to appropriate new political contexts and to (re)negotiate frontiers in the political.