Attitudinal Evaluation among Gender Ingroups and Out-Groups in Facebook Humorous Memes:

This study investigates the attitudinal evaluative meanings underlying gender identities constructed in Facebook humorous memes and compares these assessments across gender groups. The study adopted a socio-cognitive discursive view of gender as a social identity. The principles of the social identity theory allow to examine the intergroup and intragroup relations among men and women groups and subgroups and their effect on their attitudinal assessment of each other.
Employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis on 24 memes created by male and female creators, the research revealed that multimodal metaphors were the most employed method for transmitting attitudinal meanings, followed by lexical items, and then symbolic attributes and monomodal metaphors. Male social actors were positively evaluated for their normality and negatively for their propriety, tenacity, and veracity. Female social actors were positively evaluated for their normality and propriety, yet negatively for their capacity, tenacity, veracity, and propriety across both male and female creators. With differences observed between evaluations by male and female creators. Furthermore, both genders negatively evaluated their own in-group, raising questions about the underlying motivations behind the creation of memes that hold negative connotations towards one's own social cohort. The findings suggest that these evaluations may be linked to the socially constructed ideals of masculinity and femininity, as well as the complex interplay of social identity dynamics and the reproduction of gender norms within the realm of meme creation.