Greta Thunberg is ‘giving a face’ to Climate Activism: Confronting Anti-Feminist, Anti-Environmentalist, and Ableist Memes

ABSTRACT Anti-feminists, anti-environmentalists, and ableists use memes of activist Greta Thunberg, especially representations of her face, to angrily depict her as irrational and a monster. Participants in these interlinked groups create straw versions of feminist activists and distinguish men’s purported rational development of civilisation from emotional girls, women, and nature. Individuals perform such contemptuous operations, as I argue throughout this article, by misrepresenting Thunberg’s climate and feminist platform and shifting the debate from her environmental advocacy to her embodiment and emotions. I closely read these texts and employ academic literature on anti-feminisms, straw arguments, and straw feminisms to suggest how anti-feminists render simplified figurations. Given my consideration of how anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and ableist positions are enmeshed in dismissing Thunberg’s activism and physiognomy, I also outline environmental scholarship that addresses gender and disability studies literature on Asperger syndrome and enfreakment. These are complicated critical gestures, but they are necessary since the over 3,000 memes that I studied, and the associated politics, function by simultaneously dismissing girls, women, feminism, the environment, and people with disabilities. Such an analysis of online texts is pressing since anti-feminisms are designed to disqualify feminist thinking about oppression and the vitality of feminist dialogues with related political movements.