Abstract
Political cartoons are semiotic meaning systems that attempt to diagnose the reality of culture as it is. Among various other social functions, political cartoons seek to highlight human actions within the political domain and to visually depict them within an accessible framework of communal knowledge, one linked to an idealized social imperative as configured by the cartoonist, a process which is ideological in conception and realization. This poster presentation showcases how political cartoons within the new media landscape delegitimize human targets through animalistic dehumanization, a process in which a human target is depicted as a nonhuman animal thereby facilitating the metaphorical transference of culturally bound traits and characteristics. The animalistic dehumanization of political actors is an area of research which demands attention for various reasons including the ongoing philosophical discussions concerning the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals, the complexity of relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, and the intricate schematic mappings that humans have constructed for political actors in relation to different kinds of nonhuman animals. Based on 35 examples of animalistic dehumanization extracted from a corpus of 241 political cartoons, the presentation frames the analysis in relation to the rhetorical imperatives outlined by Morris (1993) as underpinning the visual rhetoric used within political cartoons in addition to Bar-Tal’s (1990, p. 65) delegitimization framework. The study shows how dehumanization as a delegitimization strategy concerns the denial of full humanness to political actors within the new media landscape and its respective systems of exploitation.
Presenters
Damian RiversProfessor, School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cartoons, Dehumanization, Politics
