Le langage satirique féministe comme stratégie de communication : le cas des Guerrilla Girls

Details

Supervisors

Del Fa, Sophie

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en communication, à finalité spécialisée: culture et communication

Abstract

enSince 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have been a New York-based collective that uses satire to denounce the systemic inequalities structuring the worlds of art and culture. While numerous studies have examined their work from social, political and artistic perspectives, their communication strategies remain relatively unexplored. This thesis therefore investigates how the Guerrilla Girls build their communication strategy through satire. This leads to the following research question: How do the Guerrilla Girls develop a feminist satirical language? With the aim of providing an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon, this research adopts a qualitative approach based on non-participant observation. The corpus consists of thirteen posters produced by the collective, supplemented by complementary data such as interviews and videos of the activists, as well as some of their works, which provide additional context for the analysis. The methodology draws on two theoretical frameworks: social semiotics and discourse analysis. These methods make it possible to identify the satirical devices employed and the communication strategy that emerges from them. The analysis reveals that satire is not used in isolation merely to entertain or provoke, but is articulated with multiple devices. The first involves appropriating pre-existing communication, cultural and institutional codes. A second mechanism emerges through the articulation of humour and tangible evidence such as statistics or verifiable facts. The final component lies in the accessibility of the message, relying on wordplay, familiar cultural references, everyday language and cultural adaptations. These devices mutually reinforce one another and together form the Guerrilla Girls' feminist satirical language. This study proposes a communication-oriented reading that invites consideration of satire as a component of a broader language. Approaching it in this way allows for a better understanding of both the systemic nature of their language and the strategies deployed by the collective.