Trump promised a return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. These findings present the growing role of popular and fan culture to political discourse on mainstream social media platforms and their varied and highly flexible expression. Such memes served to establish a sense of community, agency, and catharsis after the anxieties many Democratic voters experienced prior to the election. While meme activity peaked on November 6th and 7th, a singular viral meme of Bernie Sanders emerged after Joe Biden’s inauguration, illustrating a different genre of meme as a response to a different political situation in which the political figure serves a wide variety of purposes in commenting upon popular culture. Memes exaggerated events for comedic purposes, providing relief after a long time of tension, as well as possibly trivializing and distorting public perception of events.
Central events – such as Donald Trump’s press conference in a Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot, Joe Biden’s victory and rumors about the Russian president Putin resigning – were commented upon both with broad references to widely popular franchises such as Star Wars and with multi-layered intertextual references to iconography of meme culture such as the Hockey mascot Gritty. I illustrate which events users engage with, how they frame them using the elements of American pop culture, and the different functions such memes served for different publics. By further employing a qualitative discourse analysis and close readings of selected examples, this article explores the stances and intertextual references expressed in the memetic discourse. This article offers a thematic analysis of a corpus of memes published on Twitter between Novemand Januin relation to the U.S. Bringing memes to the study of international security, I show how the collection of images making up the Gay Clown Putin meme provides space for understanding the visual politics of security.Īn unprecedented number of memes emerged in response to the 2020 U.S.
In so doing, I deepen international relations’ engagement with queer theory by bringing in the politics of play that works through a queer epistemology that embraces deviance. Here, I provide three readings of Gay Clown Putin that suggest different possibilities for how the meme might work politically. How it has circulated and the attention it has received make it apt for exploring memes as visual political interventions that challenge national security discourses. While not all memes are political interventions, Gay Clown Putin is an iconic meme that is part of the international response to Russian state-directed political homophobia that emerged after the gay propaganda law was passed in 2013. Focusing on the case of ‘Gay Clown Putin’, this article theorizes memes as visual interventions in international politics.