Fidelis ad mortem: multimodal discourses and ideologies in Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter (non)humorous memes

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the most infamous but interest-generating tragedy in the history of the Blue Lives Matter movement, namely George Floyd's death at the hands of white police officer Derek Chauvin. Studied through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytic lens, the internet memes are shown to contribute to the polyvocal political discussion and, with some neutral or ambiguous exceptions, to display a positive (pro-) or–more often–negative (anti-) stance on each of the opposite movements (with anti-BLM items consituting the largest category in the dataset). Also, contrary to the well-entrenched conceptualisation of memes as a type of humour, the majority of the memes at hand manifest no humorous potential. Humour is present mainly among the negative-stance memes, which points to the disparagement of a target as a concomitant of humour in the memes on this serious political topic.