The Portrayal of Women in Facebook Memes

Abstract

Facebook has become an integral part in this age of social media. Both the young generation and older adults nowadays use Facebook for social interaction. Facebook has become a global platform where anyone can create a Facebook account and share their ideas, thoughts, activities, and feelings. Moreover, they can share their photos and videos on Facebook. Sometimes they share photos with some written text to satire or to make fun of other people. These elements spread around the social networking sites and float from one person to another. People usually recognize them as memes. People use memes to get shared and liked by others. But sometimes these memes carry wrong perceptions and messages which can create false consciousness among the people. The notion of gender is culturally and socially constructed. Social media sites for long are reinforcing the concept of gender stereotyping through its content. These sites are invisibly controlling people's life by transferring the stereotyped ideology. Some Facebook memes are portraying women in the way gender roles have been represented until now in social media sites. This study aims to analyze the portrayal of women on Facebook memes. In this regard, this study used purposive sampling and selected 15 Facebook memes as samples.