Approaches between political cartoons and memes in digital environments

Abstract

Proposes to research the mix between political cartoons and memes in the digital environment. The object is composed by publications in four different sites, aiming compiling humor productions created by internet users, called as memes, about the impeachment process of ex-president Dilma Roussef, occurred in 2016. By the observations of those publications, it was possible to perceive that, notwithstanding authors classify the selected images only as memes, both in the titles or in the introductory texts, some political cartoons are in the compilations without any separation of the two genders. The theoretical foundation is composed by the definitions of political cartoons by Romualdo (2000), Cagnin (1975) and Ramos (2016); as well as the definitions regarding to what memes are (or are not) by Dawkins (1976), Horta (2015) and Celidonio (2016). Beginning with the presupposition that the two genders are different, the analysis focused on the elements that fix the influence of political cartoons in the construction of the memes, a new kind of humoristic textual production that has been popularized with the growth of the internet access. That influence can justify, then, the approximation between both in the digital environment and can give birth to the mix found in the analyzed samples.