Cover not available
Article published In:
Sexuality and the discursive construction of the digital self in the Global South
Edited by Nell Haynes and Baird Campbell
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 9:1] 2020
► pp. 69–92

‘Overloaded like a Bolivian truck’

Discursive constructions of gender, race, and nationalism in northern Chilean memes

| Colby College , Waterville, ME, USA

Memes have become an important linguistic tool not only for communicating emotions and ideas, but also are integral to constructing the self in online space. This paper concentrates on copper miners in northern Chile and the ways they use memes to make claims related to (hetero)sexuality, mestizaje, and nationalism. With men at the mine during week-long shifts and families in towns several hours away, social media is important for maintaining communication as well as representing the self. Miners present their labor as central to their sense of self, with memes that indirectly index heterosexuality, modernity associated with resource extraction, and racial mestizaje linked to nationalism. The visibility of these memes across spaces of both mine and town gives men an opportunity to construct a cohesive digital self, with implications for reinforcing assumptions about what is appropriate gender performance.

Keywords: social media, memes, masculinity, race, mestizaje , nationalism, Chile
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Curating memes, performing self
  • 3.Histories of resources, race and gender
  • 4.Legacies of race and nation
  • 5.Chilean mining in the 21st century
  • 6.Pride in masculine work
  • 7.Humor and sexuality
  • 8.Online identifications
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.19002.hay
References
Babidge, Sally
2013 “Socios”: The contested morality of ‘partnerships’ in Indigenous community-mining company relations, Northern Chile. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 18(2): 274–293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella
2007 Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barchiesi, Franco
2011 Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland
1977 Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers & Cooper, Frederick
2000 Beyond ‘identity’. Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory 29(1): 1–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunn, Elizabeth C.
2015 Privatizing Poland, Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
The Economist
2013 Mining in Chile: Copper solution. [URL] (November 1 2014)
Eigenberg, Helen M.
1992 Homosexuality in male prisons: Demonstrating the need for a social constructionist approach. Criminal Justice Review 17(2): 219–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elder, Glen
1995 Of moffies, kaffirs and perverts: Male homosexuality and the discourse of moral order in the Apartheid state. In Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, David Bell (ed), 50–58. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Faulkner, Simon, Vis, Farida & D’Orazio, Francesco
2018 Analyzing social media images. In Sage Handbook of Social Media, Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick & Thomas Poell (eds), 160–178. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gerbaudo, Paolo
2012 Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Gill, Lesley
1997 Relocating class: Ex-miners and neoliberalism in Bolivia. Critique of Anthropology  171: 293–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Gould, Jeffrey
1998 To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Green, James
1998 Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Hale, Charles
2002 Does multiculturalism menace: Governance, cultural rights, and the politics of identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies 341: 485–524. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hareven, Tamara
1993 Family Time & Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Haynes, Nell
2016 Social Media in Northern Chile: Posting the Extraordinarily Ordinary. London: UCL Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 Writing on the walls: Discourses on Bolivian immigrants in Chilean meme humor. International Journal of Communication 131: 3122–3142.Google Scholar
Heinecken, Lindy
1999 The silent right: Homosexuality and the military. African Security Review 8(5): 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam & Green, Joshua
2013 Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Jofré, Daniella
2007 Reconstructing the politics of Indigenous identity in Chile. Archaeologies 3(1): 16–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, Naomi
2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Larraín, Jorge
2001 Identidad Chilena. Santiago de Chile: LOM.Google Scholar
León, Leonardo
2005 Araucanía: La violencia mestiza y el mito de la pacificación, 1880–1900. Santiago: Universidad Arcis.Google Scholar
Mapuexpress
2016 A propósito del humor chileno y el lenguaje sexista – racista. [URL] (March 4 2017)
Martin, Emily
1997 Managing Americans: Policy and changes in the meanings of work and the self. In Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power, Cris Shore & Susan Wright (eds), 183–200. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Miller, Daniel
(ed) 2001 Car Culture. London: Berg.Google Scholar
Miller Klubock, Thomas
1996 Working-class masculinity, middle-class morality, and labor politics in the Chilean copper mines. Journal of Social History 30(2): 435–463. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milner, Ryan M.
2013 Pop polyvocality: Internet memes, public participation, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. International Journal of Communication 71: 2357–2390.Google Scholar
Miltner, Kate M.
2014 “There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats”: The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an internet meme. First Monday 19(8). [URL] (November 21 2019) DOI logo
2018 Internet memes. In Sage Handbook of Social Media, Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick & Thomas Poell (eds), 412–428. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moisio, Risto, Arnould, Eric J. & Gentry, James W.
2013 Productive consumption in the class-mediated construction of domestic masculinity: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) home improvement in men’s identity work. Journal of Consumer Research 40(2): 298–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nash, June C.
1979 We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Olavarría, José & Moletto, Enrique
2002 Hombres, identidad/es y sexualidad/es: III Encuentro de Estudios de Masculinidades. Santiago, Chile: FLASCO-Chile: Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano: Red de Masculinidad/es.Google Scholar
Palmer, Gary B. & Jankowiak, William R.
1996 Performance and imagination: Toward an anthropology of the spectacular and the mundane. Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology 111: 225–258. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richards, Patricia
2013 Race and the Chilean Miracle / Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riggen, Patricia
2015 Los 33. [URL] (January 25 2019)
Rothgerber, Hank
2013 Real men don’t eat (vegetable) quiche: Masculinity and the justification of meat consumption. Psychology of Men and Masculinities 14(4): 363–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salinas, Maximiliano
1995 “Al verte sonriente decimos: ‘Viva María’”: Humor y misticismo en la religiosidad popular de Chile. UC Maule 191: 53–59.Google Scholar
Shifman, Limor
2013 Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18(3): 362–377. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Somerville, Madeleine
2018 A vexing question: Why do men recycle less than women? The Guardian. [URL] (July 5 2019)
Staab, Silke & Hill Maher, Kristen
2006 The dual discourse about Peruvian domestic workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, race, and a nationalist project. Latin American Politics and Society 48(1): 87–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stephen, Lynn
1999 Construction of Indigenous suspects: Militarization and the gendered and ethnic dynamics of human rights abuses in southern Mexico. American Ethnologist 26(4): 822–842. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Erin
2014 The curation of the self in the age of the internet. (Paper presented at IUAES 2014 with JASCA Conference, Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan)
World Bank
2017 “Bolivia | data.” World Development Indicators. World Bank Databank. [URL] (January 25 2019)
Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko
2010 Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zaremberg, Gisela & Torres Wong, Marcela
2018 Participation on the edge: Prior consultation and extractivism in Latin America. Journal of Politics in Latin America 10(3): 29–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Hiramoto, Mie
2021. Reflections on the Journal of Language and Sexuality and the view from Japan. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo
Leap, William L.
2021. Moving into the next ten years. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.