Get Gritty with it: memetic icons and the visual ethos of antifascism

ABSTRACT

This essay tracks how Gritty, the new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, emerged as a memetic icon for antifascism and the sometimes-contradictory ethos of far-left online publics. Emerging through expressive sharing, remixing, and appropriation of widely recognizable figures, memetic icons come to embody the ethos of publics, helping them foment dissent. Gritty specifically came to embody antifascists’ incivility towards fascism, as well as their desire to create a more just world. This article demonstrates how memes serve as an organizing tool for anti-capitalist politics and how tracing the circulation of images within publics shows how they produce icons.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although the Flyers’ marketing department uses he/him pronouns for Gritty, we use they/them to reflect the mascot’s uptake as a non-binary icon by queer publics, e.g. ToxicFemme666, “Gritty is Non-Binary … Get Over it Shirt – NHL Philadelphia Flyers Mascot,” Etsy shop. https://www.etsy.com/listing/727878407/gritty-is-non-binary-get-over-it-shirt(accessed December 18, 2020).

2 Bijan Stephen, “Gritty Became a Leftist Meme Because Philly Loves a Righteous Hooligan,” The Verge, October 17, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17990016/gritty-philadelphia-flyers-leftists-activism-protest-symbol.

3 Kelly Weill, “Gritty, The Philadelphia Flyers’ Bizarre New Mascot, is Antifa Now,” Daily Beast, March 15, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/gritty-the-philadelphia-flyers-bizarre-new-mascot-is-antifa-now.

4 Heather Woods and Leslie A. Hahner, Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right (New York: Peter Lang, 2019); Benjamin Krämer, “Populist Online Practices: The Function of the Internet in Right-Wing Populism,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 9 (2017): 1293–1309; Viveca S. Greene, “‘Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies,” Studies in American Humor 5, no. 1 (2019): 31–69; Julia R. DeCook, “Memes and Symbolic Violence: #Proudboys and the Use of Memes for Propaganda and the Construction of Collective Identity,” Learning, Media and Technology 43, no. 4 (2018): 485–504.

5 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. George Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

6 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, “Who’s Writing?: Aristotelian Ethos and the Author Position in Digital Poetics,” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 11, no. 3 (2007), http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/fleckenstein/index.html

7 Erik Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public life: Consensus, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 4 (2000): 361.

8 Maegan Parker Brooks, “Oppositional Ethos: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Vernacular Persona,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (2011): 511–48.

9 Laura J. Gurak, “The Rhetorical Dynamics of Delivery and Ethos in Online Communities,” in Communities in Cyberspace, ed. Peter Kollock and Marc Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998), 241–62; Byron Hawk, “Toward a Rhetoric of Network (Media) Culture: Notes on Polarities and Potentiality,” JAC 24, no. 4 (2004): 831–50.

10 Hawk, “Toward a Rhetoric,” 842.

11 Kristie S. Fleckenstein, “Cybernetics, Ethos, and Ethics: the Plight of the Bread-and-Butter-Fly,” JAC 25, no. 2 (2005): 326.

12 Bernie Hogan, “From Each According to Media? Testing Wellman’s Theory of Networked Individualism” (January 14, 2009), 1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1331009 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.13310091.

13 Dan Ehrenfeld, “‘Sharing a World with Others’: Rhetoric’s Ecological Turn and the Transformation of the Networked Public Sphere,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 5 (2020): 313. doi:10.1080/02773945.2020.1813321.

14 Leslie A. Hahner, “The Riot Kiss: Framing Memes as Visual Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49, no. 3 (2013): 151–66.

15 Heidi E. Huntington, “Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 67, no. 1 (2016): 77–93; Woods and Hahner, Make America.

16 James McVey, “Memeing the (Black) Presidency: Obama Memes and the Affective Ambivalence of Racialized Policing,” in Meta G. Carstarphen, et al. eds. “Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage,” Rhetoric Review 36, no. 4 (2017): 255–347.

17 Eric Jenkins, “The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 4 (2014): 442–66.

18 Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015).

19 Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge: MIT press, 2014): 34.

20 Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf, “‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity,” New Media & Society 18, no. 8 (2016): 1710.

21 Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 40.

22 Milner, The World Made Meme, 34.

23 Lynda Olman. “Before Climategate: Visual Strategies to Integrate Ethos across the “‘Is/Ought”‘ Divide in the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Summary for Policy Makers,” Poroi 6, no. 2 (2010): 33–61.

24 Marguerite Helmers, “Hybridity, Ethos, and Visual Representations of Smokey Bear,” JAC 31, nos. 1&2 (2011): 45–69.

25 Woods and Hahner, Make America, 71.

26 Eric S. Jenkins, “My iPod, My iCon: How and Why do Images Become Icons?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008): 466–89.

27 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 366.

28 Caitlin Bruce, “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no.1 (2015): 48.

29 Jenkins, “My iPod.”

30 Jenkins, “The Modes,” 45.

31 Gries, Still Life, 45.

32 Gries, Still Life, 14.

33 Gries, Still Life, 85–104.

34 Eric S. Jenkins, “Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 21, no. 1 (2018): 157–74.

35 Jenkins, “Materialism(s) in Recent Visual,” 170.

36 Woods and Hahner, Make America, 70–80.

37 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2007), 218.

38 Annie Kelly, “The Alt-Right: Reactionary Rehabilitation for White Masculinity,” Soundings 66 (2017): 69.

39 e.g. Jane Coatston, “Audio Tape Reveals Richard Spencer is, as Everyone Knew, a Racist,” Vox, November 4, 2019, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20947833/richard-spencer-white-nationalism-audio-milo-alt-right.

40 Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2017).

41 Peter Beinart, “The Rise of the Violent Left,” The Atlantic, September 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/.

42 Lukas Hermsmeier, “Germany’s Post-Nazi Taboo Against the Far Right Has Been Shattered,” New York Times, February 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/far-right-thuringia-germany.html; Branko Marcetic, “The Anti-Fascist Boomerang,” Jacobin Magazine, August 14, 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/fascist-free-speech-repression-far-right.

43 Natascha Lennard, “Anti-Fascist Practice and Impossible Non-Violence,” Evergreen Review, 2018, https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/.

44 Shane Burley in Josh Robinson, “Against the Alt-Right: An Interview with Shane Burley,” Abolition, May 7, 2018, https://abolitionjournal.org/against-the-alt-right-an-interview-with-shane-burley/.

45 Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 220–26.

46 Burley in Robinson, “Against the Alt-Right,” online.

47 Bray, Antifa.

48 Adam Klein, “From Twitter to Charlottesville: Analyzing the Fighting Words between the Alt-Right and Antifa,” International Journal of Communication no. 13 (2019): 298.

49 Klein, “From Twitter to Charlottesville.”

50 Emma Grey Ellis, “White Supremacists Face a Not-so-New Adversary Online: The Antifa,” WIRED, February 4, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/neo-nazis-face-new-foe-online-irl-far-left-antifa/.

51 Gritty (@GrittyNHL), “It Me. #Gritty,” Twitter, September 24, 2018, https://twitter.com/GrittyNHL/status/1044244470806523905.

52 Ian Crouch, “How the Left Won the War for Gritty, the New Mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers,” New Yorker, October 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-the-left-won-the-war-for-gritty.

53 Eli from 5 to 7 (@Eligardner), “Gritty is Antifa’s Pepe and I’m all here for it,” Twitter, October 15, 2018, https://twitter.com/Eligardner/status/1051886460834643971.

54 Immortal Scientist, “Gritty – He’s Coming,” Know Your Meme, October 8, 2018, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1418980-gritty#trending-bar.

55 Rebecca Lyn (@Bex_Lyn), “With [Heart Emoji] from @GrittyNHL,” Twitter, November 17, 2018, https://twitter.com/Bex_Lyn/status/1063869078811656192.

56 Elena Schlenker (@ElanaSchlenker), “Gritty Stans Managing to Protest Nazis and Show Their @GrittyNHL Love is PA Perfection (pics by @willsommer and @BrianPHickey),” Twitter, November 17, 2018, https://twitter.com/ElanaSchlenker/status/1063880790797402113.

57 Sung, Morgan, “Gritty was the Face of Philadelphia’s Protest against the Alt-Right,” Mashable, November 17, 2018, https://mashable.com/article/gritty-alt-right-protest-proud-boys-philadelphia (accessed November 3, 2020).

58 Rachel Miranda Wedig, Flaming Idols’ Gritty Candle Product Description, Facebook, December 31, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10214913814211789&set=pcb.1996129617163167&type=3&theater&ifg=1.

59 Wookie Rage, “Thanks for the Add. My Wife and I Were in Charge of Christmas Ornaments this Year. How’d we do?” Facebook Post, December 31, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=598086837310293&set=gm.1995901540519308&type=3&theater&ifg=1.

60 Kat Brockschmidt, “Gritty knows who’s Naughty or Nice,” Facebook Post, December 23, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156566219901210&set=gm.1984686828307446&type=3&theater&ifg=1.

61 PaintSniffer69, “Gritty ‘Antifa Worldwide’ Mural in Copenhagen,” Reddit Post, November 16, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/AntifascistsofReddit/comments/9xtcti/gritty_antifa_worldwide_mural_in_copenhagen/.

62 Bruce, “The Balaclava,” 47.

63 E.g. Jillian Kay Melchior, “Antifa Appropriates a Creepy Mascot,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/antifa-appropriates-a-creepy-mascot-1538950061.

64 Jason Edward Black, “The ‘Mascotting’ of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2002): 607.

65 Danielle Endres, “American Indian Permission for Mascots: Resistance or Complicity within Rhetorical Colonialism?” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 4 (2015): 649–90; Jackson B. Miller, “‘Indians,’ Braves,’ and ‘Redskins’: A Performative Struggle for Control of an Image,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999): 188–202.

66 Crouch, “How the Left Won the War for Gritty.”

67 Fabiola Cineas, “Donald Trump is the Accelerant,” Vox, January 9, 2021, https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-hate-speech.

68 Peter Baker, “Trump’s Contradiction: Assailing ‘Left-Wing Mob’ as Crowd Chants ‘Lock Her Up’,” New York Times, October 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/us/politics/trump-rally-opponents.html.

69 Baker, “Trump’s Contradiction,” online.

70 Nicole Hemmer, “In MLK’s Day, Conservatives Didn’t Think He was so ‘Civil’,” Vox, June 26, 2018, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/6/26/17503088/sanders-civility-red-hen-restaurant-trump-mlk-martin-luther-king-protests.

71 Robert L. Borosage, “Centrists are Using Calls for Civility to Silence the Left,” Nation, March 25, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/centrists-civility-silence-left-sanders/.

72 Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme, 105.

73 Kirsti K. Cole, “‘It’s Like She’s Eager to be Verbally Abused’: Twitter, Trolls, and (en) Gendering Disciplinary Rhetoric,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 357.

74 Ellen W. Gorsevski and Michael L. Butterworth, “Muhammad Ali’s Fighting Words: The Paradox of Violence in Nonviolent Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 52.

75 Gorveski and Butterworth, “Muhammad Ali’s Fighting Words,” 69.

76 E.gs. •̀ .̫ •́ ✧ (@SANRlOJJK), “Replying to @hasanthehun and @idkimnotfunny,” Twitter, October 13, 2018, https://twitter.com/SANRlOJJK/status/1051207587465703427; The Holliest Jolliest Tracer (@ThatPersonEddie), “Replying to @KELLYWEILL,” Twitter, October 25, 2018, https://twitter.com/ThatPersonEddie/status/1055553479480094720.

77 u/Varysisamermaid, “Gritty, How Many Men have you Killed?” Reddit post, October 29, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/grittyisantifa/comments/9sk2gj/gritty_how_many_men_have_you_killed/.

78 Anonymous, “Friendly Reminder that the Soviet Hard Left is Coming,” 4chan post, October 17, 2018, https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/189779943/.

79 Vixen Strangely, “The Only Orange Muppet I Fully Stan,” Vixen Strangely Makes Common Sense Blog, October 10, 2018, http://vixenstrangelymakesuncommonsense.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-only-orange-muppet-i-fully-stan.html.

80 Know Your Meme, “Uphold Glorious Marxism-Grittyism,” October 10, 2018, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1419641-gritty.

81 Peter Gordon, “Battle for Sevastopol,” Asian Review of Books, October 21, 2016, https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/battle-for-sevastopol/.

82 Brandon Basom, Facebook post to “Gritty Dank Meme Stash” (December 20, 2018), 4:09 pm, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1121689661346242&set=gm.208672440079339&type=3&theater&ifg=1 (accessed December 31, 2018).

83 E.g. Bristol Palin, “10 Times the ‘Tolerant’ Left Wasn’t So Tolerant,” Patheos, October 30, 2016, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bristolpalin/2016/10/top-10-times-the-tolerant-left-wasnt-so-tolerant/.

84 Tom Phillips and Hannah Jewell, “25 Tweets That Expose the So-Called ‘Tolerant Left’,” BuzzFeed, February 17, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/so-much-for-the-tolerant-left?utm_term=.qaXONRblp#.vrY07jA5Q.

85 Emily Reynolds, “The Left-Wing Meme-Makers Trying to Reclaim Meme Culture,” WIRED, May 24, 2019, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/left-wing-memes.

86 Know Your Meme, “Gritty – Seized It,” October 23, 2018, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1424036-gritty.

87 Know Your Meme, “Look At All The Fucks I Give,” May 8, 2011, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/look-at-all-the-fucks-i-give.

88 Know Your Meme, “Gritty – THE ONLY WAY TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO STOP CAPITALISM,” November 5, 2018, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1428469-gritty.

89 Dylan Petrohilos (@dpetrohilos), “This Gritty Meme Keeps Getting Better and Better,” Twitter, October 11, 2018, https://twitter.com/dpetrohilos/status/1050485689245159424.

90 Jeff Gammage and Oren Oppenheim, “Protesters in Philly March Against Trump ‘Concentration Camps’ for Migrants,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 12, 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/news/lights-for-liberty-protest-trump-immigration-raids-philadelphia-20190712.html.

91 Wedig, “Flaming Idols’ Gritty Candle Product Description,” online.

92 Taylor Casella, Facebook Post with picture of Poster in Durham, NC, October 23, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1867571313352332/permalink/2468842076558583/ (accessed November 12, 2020).

93 E.g. Kim Renfro, “Olenna Tyrell’s Iconic ‘Game of Thrones’ Death is the Newest Election Week Meme,” Insider, November 6, 2020, https://www.insider.com/game-of-thrones-gritty-election-week-meme-pennsylvania-2020-11.

94 Airea D. Matthew (@aireadee), “Gritty, y’all,” Twitter, November 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/aireadee/status/1324737777624403969