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This paper presents a first analysis of popular Internet humour about gender. The focus is on the extent to which such humour encodes sexist, feminist, and post-feminist ideologies. Utilizing a novel sampling protocol, a corpus of 150 highly popular verbal and visual comic texts was retrieved from eight English-based websites. The findings of a content analysis suggest that although men and women are mocked to an equal extent, traditional stereotypical gender representations still prevail, along with the emergence of new postfeminist portrayals. The postfeminist, essentialist thesis of gender differences is revealed to be central, while feminist humour about gender inequalities is marginal. The discussion contextualizes these findings and argues they express backlash interpretations of postfeminism. Finally, the results are discussed in relation to the high hopes held for the potential of the Internet to be involved in women's empowerment and the transformation of gender relations.
Shifman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.