Exploring Online Masculinity in the Indian Meme Culture: A Case of Video Doge Memes

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of Creative Communications

Abstract

Doge memes are a genre of internet memes, characterised by anthropomorphised Japanese Shiba Inu dog and the deliberate use of the letter ‘m’ to misspell, mispronounce and induce humour. Doge memes are widespread in the Indian meme culture and use native anthropomorphic characters, vernacular languages and text-to-speech software for storytelling, augmenting the original Doge meme’s intentionally peculiar language. Indian Doge memes are marked by their sexual humour and offensive content related to masculinity and the representation of women. Following the works of Wilkins and Eisenbraun as the theoretical basis, the study dives into the exploration of online masculinity in the Indian meme culture through textual analysis of video Doge memes and their comment sections on Instagram. The study examines the nature of digital masculinity in the online manosphere, the depiction of the men and women characters in Doge memes, the nature of dark humour induced in the storylines and its reception by the meme culture.

DOI

10.1177/09732586251344024

Publication Date

1-1-2025

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