Self Introduction Post / Correlation between Memes and Activism

Self Introduction Post / Correlation between Memes and Activism  

Ishmael Adams

Professor Doris Cacoilo 

Activists, Pranksters and Interlopers  

9/3/2025 

My name is Ishmael Adams and I'm an illustration major who's main focus lies in sketches, character design and cover design. Ever since I was around 5 to 6 years old I've had a love for creating characters through stories. From orchestrating narrative story elements, to molding in depth character motivations, storytelling has been a very stringent focus of mine. This love of creation extends to not just to sketches, but widens to encapsulate all forms of creative thinking. From writing, to painting, to the aforementioned sketching, to music, even broadening to acting.  

 

 Understanding Patriarchy 

"Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences." Ph.1

The way patriarchy as a definition seems to be thought about in the same vein as the word feminism. Both words are more gender homogenous than initially portrayed by current mainstream societies definition. Feminism is the belief that men and women should have equal opportunity in society and should not be dictated or discriminated against based on gender. 

"Patriarchy is a political-social system that  insists that males are inherently dominating,  
superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence." Ph.3

 It is only due to a lack of understanding that definition that people attribute it to something it's not. Which is a theme that can go back into multiple points in American history where the truth gets twisted, contorted and misconstrued until it's unrecognizable from it's former self or definition. It happened with the black panther party, a group who believed in equality for all which got twisted by the dominant media outlets to seemingly be terrorists' terrorizing white people.      

 

What Memes Owe to Art History 

" High-art purists eschew the argument, but the aesthetic and social sway of contemporary meme culture has roots deep in the pre-digital art-historical canon." Ph. 1 

 Memes showcase the ever increasing economical dissonance between the elite and the working class as memes, or at least the more widespread ones are a reflection of the average person's commentary on the world. Usually when corporate media tries to capitalize on the wave of memeification it tends to backfire as people usually are able to recognize how artificial it seems.

 " Performance brought art into the street and public spaces, leveling the gap between artist and audience. Similarly, memes offer a highly accessible and interactive platform of production that is ripe for challenge and dissent, with disagreements and controversy only fueling the fire of a successful meme truly going viral." Ph.4

Memes by their very nature are underground forms of art that don't give immediate power to the rich and wealthy. Memes are varied, easily producible and accessible, which not only allow for a large majority of voices to be heard, but also shine some level of awareness on a subject previously unknown to people.  

Meme's Are Our Generations Protest Art 

    “The media [of protest art] have changed somewhat, but the purposes are similar: the blaming of villains, the identification of victims, as well as outrage at the villains and compassion for those victims,” Ph.5 

Though the visualization is different at it's core memes, like all influential protest art is directed at people in power. As correlated in my previous passage memes is a working class form of art that gives widespread awareness on a subject. 

“You can express yourself with one picture of a meme better than a whole page of text,”

The beauty of memes is how quickly and efficiently the message of the meme gets across in an image, which not only is an non arduous effort on the author, but barely a scroll for the viewer. These aspects not only enforce the fast paced nature of memes, but the internet as a medium.