For Fricker, hermeneutical epistemic justice requires ensuring that marginalised populations are given the tools to make sense of their experience (2012). While Fricker dedicates more attention to the parts of experience that are closely related to oppression, there are reasons also to consider the meaning-creation that occurs around other areas of life. The following selections demonstrate how memes can be used towards the creation of cultural meaning, in particular by showing how access to the Internet in developing countries enables disparate populations to situate elements of their cultural backgrounds in a broader context, exposing absurdity and inconsistency– both within specific cultures and between different cultures.
GATSU 2017: The strict customs surrounding the feminine body are subverted in this ironic objectification of a man whose thawb clings to his body. Access to the Internet allows individuals to evaluate local cultural practices and beliefs from an abstracted perspective– as subject, not necessarily as an integral part of that culture. The result is a novel way of understanding one’s cultural background, and the absurdity inherent to it.
UNTITLED 2018: President Xi Jinping’s move towards an unprecedented third presidential term is depicted in all its brazenness as a video uploaded to PornHub. Memes may in fact constitute powerful assets for political resistance by facilitating discussion between individuals living under oppression (Shirky 2016).
PAREDES 2017: Access to the Internet has facilitated the penetration of first world cultural exports such as third wave feminism into regions of the world still beset by overt sexism and racism. At the same time, Internet access has also opened the floor for critiques of these ideologies from non-Western viewpoints. Here, the words «coqueteo» (flirtatious) and «acoso» (harassment) are imposed onto a skin tone palette to call attention to implicit racism in the ways that catcalling on the street (a common behaviour in low socioeconomic neighbourhoods in Peru) is selectively alleged by los caviares (the more affluent, non-mixed blood bourgeois of Latin America).
