PROJECTION OF INTERPERSONAL PORTRAYAL OF FEMALE POLITICAL LEADERS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA MEMES: A POLITICAL DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE
Keywords:
Political Memes, Female Political Leaders, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Intersemiotic ComplementarityAbstract
This research study attempts to investigate the interpersonal portrayal of female political leaders in Pakistani political memes. Political meme refers to an image or video, humorous in nature, carrying a hidden political agenda or message and adding a layer of political commentary with the help of text on top or bottom, editing and context. The objectives of this study are to examine the visual and linguistic strategies used in political memes in order to analyze how these multimodal resources construct the interpersonal portrayal of female political leaders, and also to explore the sociocultural and ideological meanings embedded in these representations.This research employs Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006) to scrutinize the representation of female political leaders in data set of 175 political memes. Further, this study also employs Royce (2006) Intersemiotic Complementarity as a suppoting tool to analyse and validate the text-image relationship. The data comprises of 175 political memes of female leaders from three prominent political parties i.e. PTI, PMLN, PPP, collected via different social media platforms, i.e., facebook, instagram, X (formerly twitter) etc. Out of these memes, 10 memes are selected for in depth analysis. The analysis identifies recurring representational patterns in which gendered and personalized framings emerge through the interaction of visual and linguistic elements in political memes. With the examination of political memes as multimodal texts, this study contributes to political discourse and gender studies by illuminating how digital visual–verbal practices shape gendered political meanings and underscores the significance of meme culture in contemporary political communication.
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