This study examines various combinations of visual and textual meaning-making resources in a popular Chinese meme. The meme features an exogenous image – the grinning facial expression of a U.S. wrestler, D’Angelo Dinero – that has been recontextualized into numerous other visual texts, to create semiotic ensembles with local meanings, which are then distributed across Chinese social media platforms. We analyzed 60 of these image macros, and our findings show that local meanings are created when Dinero’s facial expression is blended with visual references to Chinese digital culture, Chinese popular culture, Chinese social class issues, Chinese politics, and Chinese institutions. Previously displayed a gendered appearance, now shown as gender neutral on most platforms. Person Lifting Weights was approved as part of Unicode 7.0 in 2014 under the name Weight Lifter and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The majority of textual elements in the image macros are Chinese however, the handful of examples that also include other languages typically involve multilingual wordplay and carnivalesque themes. A person lifting a barbell loaded with weights above their head. We argue that although the multivalency of the wrestlers’ facial expression invites interpretations of a wide range of affective meanings, an overarching rebellious or transgressive stance is consistent across individual texts.Īlthough a growing body of literature has explored multilingual users' digital practice, dialects adoptions have received relatively little attention. As an important part of the Chinese language, spoken dialects, or '方言' (fangyan), are highly complex in their classification and colloquial usage. Nevertheless, Chinese online users, especially those of younger generations, find ways to incorporate dialects in stylised online expressions for language play.
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