Discursive Constructions of Gendered WhatsApp Memes as Digital Historiography in Nigeria

This study examines gendered WhatsApp memes in Nigeria as sites of digital historiography through a combined discourse-pragmatic and memetic framework. Moving beyond the treatment of memes as merely humourous or ephemeral digital artifacts, the paper argues that their repeated circulation within WhatsApp networks enables them to function as vernacular archives that document, normalize, and transmit evolving narratives of womanhood. Drawing on memetics as theorized by Richard Dawkins (1976) and extended by Shifman (2013) and Pramanick et al. (2021), the study conceptualizes WhatsApp memes as replicators whose survival depends on cultural resonance, emotional charge, and shareability. From a discourse-pragmatic perspective, the analysis investigates how implicature, indexicality, presupposition, stance-taking, and intertextuality shape the meanings embedded in these memes and guide audience interpretation.Using purposive sampling, 120 widely circulated gendered memes were collected from diverse Nigerian WhatsApp groups between 2022 and 2024. The findings reveal that these memes reproduce dominant gender ideologies—particularly around marriage, domestic labor, economic dependence, and sexual morality—while occasionally offering subtle spaces of negotiation and resistance. Their memetic success derives not only from humour but from their capacity to condense shared sociocultural assumptions into easily replicable formats. Over time, such repetition stabilizes particular representations of Nigerian womanhood, transforming everyday digital exchanges into historical records of gendered thought. The study contributes to feminist digital scholarship by positioning WhatsApp memes as participatory cultural texts that shape collective memory. It demonstrates that viral humour, far from trivial, operates as a mechanism of social continuity and ideological reinforcement in contemporary Nigeria.