ISIS-chan – the meanings of the Manga girl in image warfare against the Islamic State

ABSTRACT

This article explores gendered meanings of ISIS-chan, an Internet meme in the form of a manga girl, produced and used to disrupt the messages from the Islamic State. Moreover, it investigates the performative power of ISIS-chan, and how it is used/interpreted as it circulates on the Internet. The ISIS-chan campaign is seen as an example of how the girl figure is mobilised in the political context of the War on Terror. Characterised by girlish playfulness, humour and creativity, I suggest that ISIS-chan challenges the stereotypical representations of femininity in the War on Terror, and may be perceived as a trickster.

KEYWORDS:

• ISIS-chan
• Islamic State
• image war
• manga girl
• trickster figure

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers for constructive comments on the text, as well as the research group in the project “The futures of genders and sexualities: Cultural products, transnational spaces and emerging communities”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Chan (ちゃん^?) is a diminutive suffix; it indicates that the speaker finds a person endearing (Aga 2007).

2. Although ISIS/ISIL (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/al Sham/Greater Syria) is the most common acronym used in the West, I use the name Islamic State (IS), which is the name the group itself has used since June 2014 when it declared the creation of a caliphate (Irshaid 2015).

3. Anonymous is a hacktivist group (Coleman 2014). According to Jordan and Taylor (2004, 1), “[h]acktivism is the emergence of popular political action, of the self-activity of groups of people, in cyberspace. It is a combination of grassroots political protest with computer hacking”. While Anonymous is known today for battles against powerful and corrupt governmental, corporate and religious interests, it originally emerged from a subculture of trolling and hacking dedicated to “lulz” and poking fun at authority (Coleman 2014).

4. In 2015, the hacktivists claimed to have dismantled some 149 websites and flagged roughly 101,000 Twitter accounts and 5900 propaganda videos all linked to the Islamic State (Brooking 2015).

5. Huey (2015) gives an example of the use of political jamming to counterterrorist propaganda in an analysis of how Japanese Twitter users responded to the IS YouTube video showing the Japanese hostages.

6. A meme is broadly defined as culturally transmitted information, or ideas and beliefs that can be spread from one group/groups to another (Huntington 2013; Milner 2016).

7. Since this article is not about terrorism per se, the intense debate on the definition of terrorism lies outside the scope this work. However, my point of departure is the critical approach outlined by, for example, Jackson (2005).

8. The fundamental logics of memes are, according to Milner (2016), multimodality, reappropriation, collectivism, humour and spread.

9. According to Winter (2015, 22–31), Islamic State has generated a comprehensive brand, one that offers an alternate way of living. This brand is composed of six themes or narratives: brutality, mercy, victimhood, war, belonging and utopianism.

10. See also the manifesto by Anonymous (Jones 2015).

11. The pacifist constitution adopted by Japan after the Second World War forbids the use of force as a means of settling international disputes. Despite persistent and widespread opposition, Japanese leaders have.

12. Step by step instituted and expanded militaristic policies (Anderson 2009, 99).

13. See, for example, Johansson (2009) on how humour at the same time may challenge as well as reproduce/strengthen dominant gender relations.

14. The IS flag features a handwritten version of the shahada and is thus much less elaborate than other flags with similar messages. The top line reads: “La ‘ilaha ‘illa-llah” meaning “There is no god but God”, while the white seal reads “God Messenger Mohammed” (McLaughlin 2014).

15. The gesture refers to the tawhid, the belief in the oneness of God, and more specifically, it refers to IS’s fundamentalist interpretation of the tawhid, which rejects any other view, as idolatry (Zelinsky 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [HS 2014-1418].

Notes on contributors

Anna Johansson

Anna Johansson is senior lecturer at University West (http://www.hv.se/) with a PhD in Sociology (1999) from University of Gothenburg. Her areas of research are mainly resistance studies, critical fat studies and gender studies. Among her most recent publications are “Dimensions of everyday resistance: the Palestinian Sumūd” (2015) (with S. Vinthagen) and “Decolonising the Rainbow Flag” (2016) (with P. Laskar and D. Mulinari). She is currently part of a research project (founded by the Swedish Research Council) titled “The futures of genders and sexualities: Cultural products, transnational spaces and emerging communities”. The study will follow three cultural products: the rainbow flag, manga and the veil, examining their role in the making of transnational communities which reiterate, resist, and recast gender and sexuality norms.