Abstract

CANEDO, Nicolás. Political Memes and Fan Art: Images in the argentinian electoral conversation of 2023. Inmediac. Comun [online]. 2024, vol.19, n.2, e212.  Epub Dec 01, 2024. ISSN 1510-5091.  https://doi.org/10.18861/ic.2024.19.2.3763.

This article analyzes, from a socio-semiotic perspective, the images shared on Twitter (today, social network X) about two media events involving Javier Milei and Ramiro Marra, members of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) and candidates, respectively, for president of the nation and head of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, during the 2023 electoral campaign in Argentina. These images, in the form of memes and fan art, played an important role in the electoral campaign and two participatory slogans from that productive universe were selected for later analysis: the “Marra, the Spaniard” meme and the fictional affair between Javier Milei and Myriam Bregman. Based on a corpus of 44 screenshots collected between September 24 and October 10, 2023, an enunciative analysis was carried out and the laughing proposal displayed in the images was also analyzed, in addition to classifying users according to their position on LLA. It is argued that users of this political space sought to direct the conversation towards their topics of interest, using humor and provocation to reinforce their own political framing. It is argued that the production and circulation of amateur visual pieces, carried out in the context of collective jokes, constitute forms of participation that can be politically exploited by activists and political spaces, being an expression of a new predominance of the iconic-indexical in an hypermediated political conversation.

Keywords : hypermediatization; digital political conversation; cyberactivism; Internet memes; fan art.

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