A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF IMPLICATURE AND GENDER REPRESENTATION IN ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN MEMES

Abstract

Internet memes can be considered as multimodal constructions as they typically involve a combination of images
and texts. Memes are commonly humorous, but they have also been used to convey more specific messages, such
as memes that include gender representation contents. Additionally, the messages included in the memes are not
always explicitly presented. In other words, the memes contain implicature, and the readers must be able to
interpret the implied meaning to fully understand them. Although several studies on gender representation in
memes have been conducted, studies that compare the gender representation in English and Indonesian memes
are scarce. Therefore, this study aims to fill the gap by highlighting how men and women are portrayed in English
and Indonesian memes. More specifically, the purpose of this research is to examine how the multimodal elements
in memes (i.e., image and text) interact with one another and contribute to the construction of the implicature
regarding gender representation. The research also aims to investigate whether there are similarities and
differences in the way gender is represented in the English and Indonesian memes. A total of 12 “men vs. women”
memes (6 English and 6 Indonesian) taken from various internet sources serve as the main data and are analyzed
qualitatively. The findings reveal that both the text and image in memes play a significant role in the construction
of the implicature regarding gender representation. Additionally, it is also found that men and women are
portrayed very similarly between the English and Indonesian memes