Susana Distancia
Memes and popular culture during the Covid-19 pandemic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18979396 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anna Lee Mraz Bartra (0000-0001-9092-962X, Twitter (United States), corresponding author), Eloy Caloca-Lafont (0000-0002-3120-9873, Twitter (United States)), Paola Ricaurte Quijano (0000-0001-9952-6659, Twitter (United States)), Eduardo Paz (0000-0003-0918-7011, Twitter (United States)), Nelly Marina Elizalde (0000-0001-6630-7564), Mariel Rosauro Zasso (0000-0003-3166-8604, Twitter (United States)), Luis Angel Escobar Loera |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 655-662 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1472-586X • E-ISSN: 1472-5878 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1472586x.2022.2059556 |
| OpenAlex | W4280534249 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 13 |
Between the end of March and June 2020, COVID-19 quickly spread in Mexico. As a response, the Mexican government announced its national prevention campaign, called ‘Susana Distancia,’ a set of measures, recommendations, conferences, educational resources, and a chatbot. At the centre of the campaign was Susana Distancia’s character, a young woman designed in a comic-book-style, echoing the Mexican lucha libre heroes, who recommended keeping 1.5 m (6 feet) of physical distance to prevent contagion. In the following visual essay, we analyse Susana Distancia’s role, from its institutional origins to its later transformation as a popular culture meme. Based on the Latin American theory of the popular, we argue that the Susana Distancia, as a meme, used various mechanisms to support and challenge the institutional discourse. In this sense, Susana Distancia can be considered a meme that embraces the popular: a cultural artefact that travels across different languages, spaces, and rituals, from cyberspace to the streets, from governmental intentions to everyday performativity. When we use lo popular as a category, we refer to the possibility of enacting subaltern narratives in aesthetic and ethical terms. Multiple readings and manifestations of Susana Distancia demonstrate popular culture as a means of travelling through diverse semantic appropriations. Various forms of popular culture: the politised, the artistic, the erotic, the authentic, the mainstream, and the political, converge in the translation of meaning, from the institutional discourse to the lived experiences of the Mexican population
Art · Comics · Literature · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Sociology · Subaltern · Communication and COVID-19 Impact · Media Studies and Communication · Social Media and Politics
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |