Memes are rife with irony and self-deprecation, making them a favorite among LGBTQ Instagram users who want to both discuss heavy topics and laugh at them. They’ve grown so popular that Instagram is now hiring a “ strategic partnerships manager” to focus on meme accounts and “digital publishers,” like and importantly, memes are powerful because almost anything can be turned into one, including Chris Evans having acrylic nails Photoshopped onto his hands, pretty much anything Rihanna does, or a still from one of the Real Housewives franchises. Memes have turned people into both celebrities and victims of online bullying. There are even entire sites like dedicated to helping internet users or out-of-touch adults stay abreast of which memes are still popular and which memes have been tossed aside. Memes entered the mainstream cultural conversation roughly around 2011, according to Google Trends, and they still follow a basic format: Content, such as photos, videos, or GIFs, is combined with text that adds typically humorous context. Instagram’s usually overcurated influencer culture is now being met with meme accounts that cater less to our vacation photos and more to our insecurities, sexual fantasies, and sometimes even our nihilism. Though Instagram doesn’t publicly release reports about how people under the age of 18 use the platform, a May 2018 study from the Pew Research Center estimates that 52 percent of teens are on it. More than 1 billion people use Instagram each month, and more than 70 percent of those users are under the age of 35. Cut to the 1980s and the invention of the internet, fast-forward to the online forums of the late ’90s and early 2000s: Tumblr pages becoming sanctuaries, blogspots becoming full-blown anonymous advice columns, even AOL group chats where your internet ex first asked you “A/S/L?” These days, the road most traveled leads to Instagram meme accounts, one of the most contemporary forms of visibility, expression, and sanctuary. Though we cannot create such a utopia, at the very least we can try-and we’ve been trying online for more than 20 years. As sweet as it sounds, guaranteeing “safety” for anyone-let alone queer people-seems like a leap. I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as a safe space. This article was published in Sanctuary Issue #85 | Winter 2020 Subscribe »
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