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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the wagecuck, a 4chan meme portraying wage workers and NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) counterparts, as an artifact of white nationalist desire. Through a rhetorical materialist analysis focused on exchange, I argue that wagecuck memes encourage viewers to pursue white recognition to offset anxieties of race, class, and sexuality. The meme circulates cuckold and wage-slave tropes to construct the white working-class man as a human agent in pursuit of antiblack jouissance. This research identifies the fantasy of racial agency as the meme’s operative logic, encouraging scholars to move beyond its humanist underpinnings.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Calum Lister Matheson and Paul Elliott Johnson for their help in preparing this manuscript, Gordon Mitchell for his rigorous feedback, and E. Chebrolu for their comments and support.
Notes
1 Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Reprint edition (Harper Collins, 2009); “The Absolute State of Wage Cucks,” /pol/, Thread #150456350, November 22, 2017, https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/150456350/.
2 “Untitled Thread,” /tv/, Thread #130337677, March 5, 2020, http://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/130337677/.
3 Jared Sexton, “The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 1, 2003): 243.
4 Phillip Hamilton, “Wagie,” Know Your Meme, June 14, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wagie.
5 Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, eds., Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: transcript publishing, 2019); Eemeli Hakoköngäs, Otto Halmesvaara, and Inari Sakki, “Persuasion Through Bitter Humor: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric in Internet Memes of Two Far-Right Groups in Finland,” Social Media + Society 6, no. 2 (April 1, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120921575; 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 (October 2, 2018): 485–504, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1544149.
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7 Sexton, “The Consequence of Race Mixture,” 245.
8 Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2020), 76.
9 Sexton, “The Consequence of Race Mixture”; Anthony Paul Farley, “Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness,” in Antiblackness, by Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), https://muse.jhu.edu/book/82781.
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11 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16.
12 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 2.
13 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 22.
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15 Sexton, “The Consequence of Race Mixture,” 262.
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18 Johnson, Mapping the Meme, 29.
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22 Kelly, Apocalypse Man, 11.
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29 Gries, “Iconographic Tracking,” 335.
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33 Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again, 119.
34 Kelly, Apocalypse Man, 62.
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39 Fernando Quinones Valdivia, “From Meme to Memegraph: The Curious Case of Pepe the Frog and White Nationalism” (University of Northern Iowa, 2019), 3–4, https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/949.
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44 Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas, Antiblackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 6.
45 Sheldon George, “Jouissance and Discontent: A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race and American Slavery,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 23, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 285, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-018-0105-0.
46 Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities,” in Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (Boston, MA, 2018), 188–202.
47 Aidan Walker, “Wojak / Feels Guy,” Know Your Meme, July 9, 2015, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wojak-feels-guy.
48 Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Memes, Macros, Meaning, and Menace: Some Trends in Internet Memes,” December 13, 2019, 52, https://doi.org/10.18848/2470-9247/CGP.
49 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, New Edition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974), 32.
50 Farley, “Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness,” 86.
51 Genie A. Donley, “The Gathering Storm: The Role of White Nationalism in U.S. Politics” (BA thesis, Cleveland State University, 2018), 94–95.
52 Luz Calvo, “Racial Fantasies and the Primal Scene of Miscegenation,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89, no. 1 (February 1, 2008): 63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2007.00001.x.
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54 Sexton, “The Consequence of Race Mixture,” 260.
55 Hamilton, “Wagie.”
56 Calum Lister Matheson, “Psychotic Discourse: The Rhetoric of the Sovereign Citizen Movement,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 2 (March 15, 2018): 198, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2017.1306876.
57 Kelly, Apocalypse Man, 85.
58 Farley, “Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness,” 89.
59 Colin Cremin, “Never Employable Enough: The (Im)Possibility of Satisfying the Boss’s Desire,” Organization 17, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 144, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508409341112.
60 Leslie A. Hahner, “The Riot Kiss: Framing Memes as Visual Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49, no. 3 (January 1, 2013): 153, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2013.11821790.
61 Sally Robinson, Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Anti-Consumerism in American Culture, 1st ed. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 9.
62 Robinson, Authenticity Guaranteed, 32.
63 Ibid.
64 Karen Lee Ashcraft and Lisa A. Flores, “‘Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis,” 2003, 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930310001602020.
65 Matheson, “Filthy Lucre,” 251.
66 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1338742.
67 Farley, “Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness,” 86.
68 Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso Books, 2016), 63.
69 Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (Routledge, 2002), 3.
70 Sheldon George, “From Alienation to Cynicism: Race and the Lacanian Unconscious,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2014): 364, https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.36.
71 Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 1, 2003): 230, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579.
72 Yko Day, “Afro-Feminism before Afropessmism: Meditations on Gender and Ontology,” in Antiblackness, ed. Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 73, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/82781.
73 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Books, 1999), 73.
74 Jung and Vargas, Antiblackness, 7.
75 Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 777, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12615.
76 RSNBH, Nick Fuentes – Wagies Be Like, YouTube video, 4:15. October 21, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdqqItImfcU (accessed April 30, 2020).
77 u/wagecucker, “Feudal Serf VS. Modern Wagecuck,” r/NEET, reddit, August 7, 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/NEET/comments/cng63b/feudal_serf_vs_modern_wagecuck/.
78 Claudia Leeb, “Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan,” Open Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (October 1, 2018): 15, https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0022.
79 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: John Hunt Publishing, 2009), 8.
80 Michael Mayne, “White Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia,” in Affect, Emotion, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Communication, ed. Lei Zhang and Carlton Clark (Routledge, 2018).
81 Garba and Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor,” 777.
82 Kelly, Apocalypse Man, 8.
83 Marina Levina, “Whiteness and the Joys of Cruelty,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 76, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1435079.
84 Chebrolu, “The Racial Lens of Dylann Roof,” 61.
85 McEwan, “This Meme Is What We Call Progress,” 5.
86 Farley, “Toward a General Theory of Antiblackness,” 93.
87 Johnson, “Mapping the Meme,” 31.
88 Robinson, Black Marxism, 296.
89 Noel Ignatiev, “The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It” (The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, University of California, Berkeley: Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism, 1997), http://www.campusactivism.org/server-new/uploads/abolishthepoint.pdf.
90 John T Warren, “Performing Whiteness Differently: Rethinking the Abolitionist Project,” Educational Theory 51, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 458.
91 Lisa A. Flores and Dreama G. Moon, “Rethinking Race, Revealing Dilemmas: Imagining a New Racial Subject in Race Traitor,” Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2002): 195, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310209374732.
92 Dreama Moon and Lisa A. Flores, “Antiracism and the Abolition of Whiteness: Rhetorical Strategies of Domination among ‘Race Traitors,’” Communication Studies 51, no. 2 (June 1, 2000): 102, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388512.