Greta Thunberg is ‘giving a face’ to Climate Activism: Confronting Anti-Feminist, Anti-Environmentalist, and Ableist Memes

ABSTRACT

Anti-feminists, anti-environmentalists, and ableists use memes of activist Greta Thunberg, especially representations of her face, to angrily depict her as irrational and a monster. Participants in these interlinked groups create straw versions of feminist activists and distinguish men’s purported rational development of civilisation from emotional girls, women, and nature. Individuals perform such contemptuous operations, as I argue throughout this article, by misrepresenting Thunberg’s climate and feminist platform and shifting the debate from her environmental advocacy to her embodiment and emotions. I closely read these texts and employ academic literature on anti-feminisms, straw arguments, and straw feminisms to suggest how anti-feminists render simplified figurations. Given my consideration of how anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and ableist positions are enmeshed in dismissing Thunberg’s activism and physiognomy, I also outline environmental scholarship that addresses gender and disability studies literature on Asperger syndrome and enfreakment. These are complicated critical gestures, but they are necessary since the over 3,000 memes that I studied, and the associated politics, function by simultaneously dismissing girls, women, feminism, the environment, and people with disabilities. Such an analysis of online texts is pressing since anti-feminisms are designed to disqualify feminist thinking about oppression and the vitality of feminist dialogues with related political movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-feminism
• climate change
• disability
• Greta Thunberg
• online
• memes
• straw feminism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Many Internet texts include typographical errors and unconventional forms of spelling, uppercase and lowercase typefaces, punctuation, and spacing. I have retained these formatting features in quotations without such qualifications as ‘intentionally so written’ or ‘sic.’ In the references, I have left the titles of Internet articles and sites as they are represented online but reformatted news citations.

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Notes on contributors

Michele White

Michele White is a Professor of Internet Studies at Tulane University. Her monographs include Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (2015); Producing Masculinity: The Internet, Gender, and Sexuality (2019); and Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings (Forthcoming). She co-edited the Feminist Media Histories issue on Genealogies of Feminist Media Studies (2018) and Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture (2022).