DECODING GENDERED MEANINGS: A BARTHESIAN SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE ‘THROUGH WASFA’ INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

Abstract

Instagram illustrations are a key platform for the representation and negotiation of social and cultural meanings, as the amount of visual content being used on social-media platforms grows. But, illustrations dealing with gender are not just visual and verbal artefacts, they can build, produce and contest culturally ingrained assumptions about gender. The current study thus explores the ways in which selected illustrations on Instagram create and challenge gendered meaning and ways in which they contribute to the re-production, negotiation and re-signification of gender ideologies. The study is qualitative with the analysis of 11 purposively selected illustrations from the Instagram account @throughwasfa. The semiotic framework proposed by Roland Barthes(1972) is regarded as the main analytical framework and his notions of denotation, connotation, myth, ideology, and naturalization are used to analyze the visual resources, whereas Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar is applied as a supporting framework for the analysis of the organization of visual resources. The analysis shows that different meanings are created around beauty, skin color, body appearance, domesticity, marriage, motherhood, social surveillance, public behavior and women's autonomy by the interplay of visual and verbal signs. The results also reveal how culturally defined gender roles can be naturalized when they are represented as the normal and natural attributes of women. The illustrations, meanwhile, are often ironic, comical, exaggerating, contradictory, self-asserting, and defiant in challenging and re-letting these expectations—and re-signifying familiar gendered meanings. The study is important because it shows that the illustrations on Instagram can be a multimodal place for ideological reproduction and contestation. It helps readers gain insight into the role of visual and verbal resources in creating and contesting gendered meanings, and demonstrates the importance of Barthesian semiotics for the analysis of the ideological and cultural meanings of current social-media discourses.