Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are memes theory? Memes and femmes are both marked by failure; femmes fail to be sufficiently feminine, or sufficiently queer, memes fail as cultural productions, plagued by low-culture. Together, I argue, femmes and memes produce low theory. In my study of femme memes, I argue that they can be understood as making significant political and cultural contributions if framed by existing scholarship on memes that emphasize political and communicative functions (Chen 2012 Chen, C. 2012. “The Creation and Meaning of Internet Memes in 4chan: Popular Internet Culture in the Age of Online Digital Reproduction.” Habitus 3: 6–19. [Google Scholar]). Drawing from existing scholarship on internet memes, as well as feminist and queer theory, I argue that femmes are low theory practitioners, and memes are a mode of theorizing—a form of marginalized knowledge production that comes from a long lineage of the feminized, DIY cultures that occur in marginal spaces, like girlhood bedrooms. In this paper, I examine three key themes of femme memes—casual misandry, femme invisibility, and emotional vulnerability—to argue that femmes use memes to queer femininity and position femme as a political thinker and feeler. Through the creation and circulation of femme memes, femmes create a femme public that is both political and affective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".