1. ALESHA SERADA
GOOD TIMES FOR A CHANGE:
UN-QUEERING MORRISSEY MEMES

2. WILL NATURE MAKE A MAN OF ME YET?
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Queering Morrissey
Andersson, J. (2011). Vauxhall’s Post-industrial Pleasure
Gardens: ‘Death Wish’ and Hedonism in 21st-century
London. Urban Studies, 48(1), 85–100.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009360238
Dillane, A., Power, M. J., & Devereux, E. (2014). ‘I Can
Have Both’: A queer reading of Morrissey. Journal of
European Popular Culture, 5(2), 149–163.
https://doi.org/10.1386/jepc.5.2.149_1
Rukes, F. (2017). The Disruption of Normativity:
Queer Desire and Negativity in Morrissey and The
Smiths. Gender Forum, 64.

3. A VERY IMPORTANT RESEARCH QUESTION
THAT HAS LINGERED FOR FOUR DECADES
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Is Morrissey racist?
Baker, J. H. (2012). In the Spirit of ’69? Morrissey and the
Skinhead Cult. In Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and
Identities (pp. 53–72). Intellect Books.
Power, M. J., Dillane, A., & Devereux, E. (2012). A push and a
shove and the land is ours: Morrissey’s counter-hegemonic
stance(s) on social class. Critical Discourse Studies, 9(4), 375–
392. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.713207
Devereux, E., & Hidalgo, M. (2015). ‘You’re gonna need
someone on your side’: Morrissey’s Latino/a and Chicano/a
fans. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 12(2), 21.
Dillane, A., Power, M. J., & Devereux, E. (2017). “Shame Makes
the World Go Around”: Performed and Embodied (Gendered)
Class Disgust in Morrissey’s “Slum Mums.” In Music as
Multimodal Discourse Semiotics, Power and Protest (pp. 47–
70). Bloomsbury Academic.

4. How is Morrissey
perceived today?
T H E A N S W E R C A N B E F O U N D I N M E M E S

5. Exploratory/philosophical meme studies
▸ Why are memes?
▸ Do memes have politics?
Functional meme studies
▸ How and why memes circulate?
▸ Practical application: how to make a viral
meme?
Semiotic meme studies
▸ How memes produce meaning?
▸ Practical application: how to say things with memes?
Memes are a language
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Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press.
Seiffert-Brockmann, J., Diehl, T., & Dobusch, L. (2018). Memes as
games: The evolution of a digital discourse online. New Media &
Society, 20(8), 2862–2879.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817735334
Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital
Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. Routledge.
Bown, A., & Bristow, D. (Eds.). (2019). Post Memes: Seizing the
Memes of Production. Punctum Books.

6. PROBABLY THE STRAIGHTEST MEME
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Enter Chad

7. Internet explains itself
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8. AS SOON AS THE LOGIC OF THE SIGH IS ESTABLISHED, SECOND AND THIR D
GENERATION MEMES ARE PRODUCED
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Exploring semiotic binaries

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10. LET THE CULTURE WAR COMMENCE!
24.7.2022 ALESJA SERADA
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Chad Morrissey vs. Virgin Robert Smith

11. Looking for meaning
beyond memes
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12. SEMIOTICS OF BINARIES ARE TESTED IN THEIR NEXT ITERATIONS
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The simplest logical operation:
inversion

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Memes are
continuous
conversations

14. NOT THE GREATEST MEME, BUT A GREAT EXAMPLE OF MEME SYNTAX
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Recombining ‘lexical units’

15. SEMIOTICS OF BINARIES ARE TESTED IN THEIR NEXT ITERATIONS
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Third order ‘lexical’ operation +
second order ‘syntactic’ operation

16. IS IT HOW HIS REMAINING FAN BASE SEES HIM?
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Morrissey’s evolution in one meme

17. JUST LIKE MORRISSEY DOES
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Conclusion:
Memes deny binary logic
▸ Memes are a language which can be used to discuss important matters
▸ Memes are inherently queer (they establish a binary and then disrupt it)
▸ Memes can tell a lot about public perception of a celebrity persona
▸ Very difficult to attribute to particular authors or audiences (same as folklore)
▸ But, if we look at memes as language units, maybe we don’t need attribution?
▸ Popular memes assume that Morrissey is racist, actually, although this
assumption is based on how media depicts him
▸ Memes also reflect on his queerness, but typically in a positive way

18. ASERADA@UWASA.FI
T H A N K Y O U !