Exploring Women Representation in Meme Discourse: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Selected Memes from Pakistani Facebook Pages

Today, creating, viewing, and sharing memes has become a daily activity for many users on the social media, especially Facebook. This study analyzes women representation in meme discourse. The study aims to investigate how women are represented in the memes of Pakistani Facebook pages. It has particularly focused how women are linguistically and visually portrayed in the memes. Also, the study has identified stereotyping about women in Pakistani context. For investigating women representation in memes, 6 popular internet memes had been selected from three Pakistani Facebook Pages, Lateefon Ki Dunay, Mangobaz and Sarcamistan. To explore women representation in the memes, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis was applied as a theoretical framework. The findings of the study revealed that women are represented in negative manners in Pakistani Facebook pages. Moreover, the memes maintains the stereotypical representation of women. The study concluded that such stereotypes and negativity about women should be eliminated by educating people, especially men.