Memeing the Margins

The study examines internet memes as sites of ideological reproduction in the Malayalam digital public sphere of Kerala, South India. It argues that regional memes draw heavily from fragments of Malayali popular cultural memory—practices and representations historically circulated through films and mass media—to construct and naturalize specific forms of masculinity. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of Malayalam memes in circulation, the study identifies and theorizes a recurrent male stock character, Colony Vanam, as a discursive figure through which caste and class intersect to produce a normative ideal of Malayali manhood. The study traces the genealogy of this character type and its relation in structuring the hegemonic masculinity in Kerala. It contributes to broader conversations about how digital humor consolidates hegemonic masculinity and how regional vernacular internet cultures reproduce, contest, and transform dominant ideological formations. It argues that regional stock characters in meme cultures are not peripheral to global conversations about masculinity but are central sites where class–caste-based gendered hierarchies are constantly archived and renewed.