A Meme Against Misogyny: Artfully Using Memes For Activist Inspired Art Education

It is impossible to log into a social media platform and not see a meme being posted. For a while now, memes have been proliferating everywhere, popping up in likely places like ad campaigns and humor blogs, but also more surprising arenas like academia.

I am generally leery of most memes and hesitant to engage in meme culture. However, I do see, and have noticed instances where memes can be effectively used as a resource for teaching and learning. I have written about these scenarios in a post called “Art-fly Learning,” a title inspired by the fly, which landed on Mike Pence’s head during the 2020 vice presidential debates. Memes influenced and inspired by current events can add value to discourses around the humanities, including (but not limited to) politics and social science. Applying discipline-specific themes to memes might actually be beneficial when trying to spark inquiry-based learning. Especially among younger generations of students who realize that memes are a way to express themselves and add their voices to cultural conversation.

A fly is an apt symbol to illustrate the way a meme operates. Flies reproduce quickly and thrive throughout the world, albeit with a rather short individual life span. Like the common housefly individual memes come and go, but the larger concept continues to flourish under contemporary societal conditions. While the structural and aesthetic qualities of memes have become formulaic (just do a Google search for “meme generator” and you will see what I mean), the subject matter and vernacular frequently changes. Anyone can make a meme, but memes that abide by themes which are trending are obviously going to attract the most attention.

One recent trendy meme is, for lack of a better title, “she’s a 10 but…” According to a website called Know Your Meme: “The central premise of the meme is to give a hypothetical person of some level of attractiveness a quality that will either positively or negatively affect their attractiveness level. Often this takes the shape of ‘S/he’s a 10 but…’ followed by a playful negative attribute, usually intended to be humorous.”

I generally have a rule of thumb regarding memes, which is that I will only engage with them if there is an opportunity to utilize it as a pedagogical resource or thought provoking conversation piece. As you may have noticed from the image at the top of this post, I have chosen to engage with the “she’s a 10 but…” meme. I have decided to throw my hat in the ring because I have noticed that the meme has become a largely unchecked outlet for chauvinist behavior. At the same time, the meme’s formulaic structure presents ample opportunities to call out deplorable behavior and uplift the identities of those who are consistently marginalized.

As an arts educator, if I do end up making a meme, I always turn to artworks and themes from art history, in order to communicate and address contemporary issues or ideas. Think of it as an art-centered educational one-liner, if you will. Instead of adding to the legions of derogatory content that the “she’s a 10 but…” meme and others like it have inspired, the meme that I have created seeks to divert the chauvinistic discourse towards a discussion that is intersectionally empowering, and might even elicit a “teachable moment.”

In this case, my meme features a seventeenth-century oil painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, titled Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1612-13). Gentileschi’s painting references the biblical story of a Jewish woman named Judith, slaying an invading Assyrian general named Holofernes. The painting portrays the climatic moment when Judith beheaded the oppressive male political figure who was planning to stage a devastating attack on the Jewish people.

Gentileschi was a Baroque era painter and one of the most prominent and accomplished professional artists during her lifetime; a feat which was incredibly rare for a woman then, and still stymies women in light of ongoing workplace and societal gender discrimination and inequity. Although she is the subject of immense scholarship today, Gentileschi’s notoriety was unjustly effected in her era due to her being the victim of a sexual assault and having to endure an exploitative trial thereafter.

The story of Gentileschi’s rape and her experiences seeking justice are all too familiar in the twenty-first century, where victims are dragged through a long and arduous process, which forces them to relive their trauma and often provides them with little recourse for actual restitution and integrity. Gentileschi’s rapist was a fellow artist named Agostino Tassi, who she had become acquainted with through her father, Orazio Gentileschi. In 1611, her father was collaborating with Tassi on a commission to paint the vaults of Casino delle Muse within the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome. In May of that year, Tassi visited the Gentileschi household where he raped Artemisia. Despite there being witnesses including a man named Cosimo Quorli who assisted Tassi during the rape, there was no immediate action taken to hold the men accountable for their heinous crime. As seventeenth-century Rome was very much a patriarchal society, she was expected to marry him. Tassi only faced (limited) liability for his actions when he reneged the marriage nine months later.

Art historian Mary O’Neill (2002) recounts the disturbing and heinous ordeal of Gentileschi’s rape and the resulting trial, which was also physically and emotionally traumatic for her: “At the time, rape was viewed more as a crime against a family’s honor than as a violation of a woman. Thus, only when the married Tassi reneged on his promise to marry Artemisia did Orazio bring charges against him. In the ensuing eight-month trial, Artemisia testified that she was painting when Tassi came into the room shouting, “Not so much painting, not so much painting.” He then grabbed the palette and brushes from her hands and threw them to the floor. She fought and scratched to no avail, finally attacking him with a knife. To establish her truthfulness, authorities administered a primitive lie detector test—in the form of torture by thumbscrews, a common practice at the time. As the cords were tightened around her fingers, she was said to have cried out to Tassi, ‘This is the ring you give me, and these are your promises.'” Tassi was convicted, but only faced minimal consequences, not nearly befitting of the serious crime he committed.

Some contemporary art historians have interpreted some of Gentileschi’s paintings as a response to her rape and a biting feminist critique of the patriarchal Roman society. While it is easy to read Judith Slaying Holofernes as an early example of a feminist work of art, scholars have contributed arguments and interpretations both for and against this theory. On the one hand, there are those who consider the painting to be a feminist scene of a woman taking a stand against the stereotypical submissive portrayal of gender in art. Through this lens, Gentileschi’s work is a counter-narrative to how male artists have subjugated women in their paintings. She was one of the earliest Western painters to portray women via a women’s perspective and essentially diverted the traditional male gaze by boldly challenging the status quo of traditional artistic portrayals of feminine beauty through her fusion of sexual allure and bodily autonomy.

Others, including the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, see Gentileschi’s work as a bold portrayal of themes that were common in Baroque era paintings, and by sensationalizing it solely as a revenge piece, she finds that Gentileschi’s oeuvre and her artistic prowess is overshadowed. She explains that labeling Gentileschi as a painter of revenge scenes is a disservice to her overall artistic identity, and is “more a matter of notoriety and sensationalism than of any real interest in or comprehension of ‘Gentileschi’” (quoted in Lucy Cosslett, 2020). This type of labeling and yearning to create socially engaged narratives from the past, is a common pitfall when associating the politics of identity to works of art.

However, despite the behest of certain cultural theorists and critics (i.e. Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”), it is generally quite hard to separate the artist from the artwork. The modern day theory of Gentileschi creating powerful painterly rebuttals to the patriarchy is both tantalizing and galvanizing for activist causes in support of bodily autonomy and other human rights that should be afforded to all women.

Regardless of its initial intent, a work of art, especially a well-made and important one, almost always outlives its creator and is transported into consecutive eras with different ideologies and lived experiences. This shift in thinking and responding to previous media largely reflects the basis of meme culture. It also explains my thought process for appropriating Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes as a means to reject the chauvinistic direction that I saw the “she’s a 10 but…” meme trending towards. The both subtle and outright objectification of women through this meme is part of the larger societal routine of judging and commodifying people based on their gender, race, ethnicity or physical appearance.

I love what fellow blogger, Wambua Muindi (2021) writes about meme culture’s “subtle masculinity.” He states that: “We seem to be ‘in bed’ with a status quo that has now turned to subtle subjugation of women; sort of not as harmful attacks, by the patriarchal empire, on womanhood thinly veiled as humour. In other words, we seem to have ‘baptised’ patriarchy to suit this contemporary dispensation in a variety of ways. E-patriarchy, digitized patriarchy, as vicious as any other form of patriarchy, has been made a functional part of the internet which has meant the digitisation of patriarchy, especially through the meme culture.”

Whether Gentileschi was creating work in direct opposition to the patriarchy, or not, her imagery is indicative of a non-male hegemonic perspective. This was not only exceptional during her time, but it remains highly relevant in today’s culture when it is evident that patriarchal and masculine views dominate our laws and social structure. Therefore, I feel that incorporating her Judith Slaying Holofernes within the “she’s a 10 but…” phenomenon is a good way to counter an ongoing problem across meme culture and culture at large. As educators, we should not let these trendy moments pass us by. We can use memes as a way to engage in open-ended and inquiry driven conversations about what topics are emphasized, ignored, or misrepresented; and inspire critical thinking and research that will let our students and ourselves formulate empathetic and informed responses.

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References, Notes, Suggested Reading:

Lucy Cosslett, Rhiannon. “The history of art is full of female masters. It’s time they were taken seriously,” The Guardian, 7 October 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/07/history-of-art-female-masters-artemisia-gentileschi

Muindi, Wambua. “Meme Culture; Fun or Patriarchy?” Life and literature, 16 October 2021. https://wambuainks.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/meme-culture-fun-or-patriarchy/

O’Neill, Mary. “Artemisia’s Moment,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2002. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/artemisias-moment-62150147/

https://wambuainks.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/meme-culture-fun-or-patriarchy/