Multimodal meaning-making in the representation of R.A. Kartini on Instagram: A comparative intersemiotic analysis

Contemporary and Islamic discourses often reconstruct R.A. Kartini’s ideas on women’s rights highlight a gap in current research regarding the systematic understanding of the integration of verbal and visual narratives on social media platforms. This study examines the application of specific types of intersemiotic complementarity by two Instagram accounts, @mubadalah.id and @cerita_parapuan, in their representations of Kartini. It also explores the implications of these multimodal variations to comprehend their respective institutional practices. Applying Royce’s (2007) intersemiotic complementarity, this study conducts a systematic analysis of the verbal-visual relationships within a targeted corpus of 37 slides from ten commemorative posts spanning a six-year period. The accounts were chosen for their differing ideological perspectives: @mubadalah.id represents an inclusive Islamic epistemology, whereas @cerita_parapuan operates as secular, corporate-oriented mainstream media outlet. The results suggests that @mubadalah.id primarily employs repetition to minimize ambiguity and explicitly convey meaning. This approach implies that the account utilizes repetition to present emancipating messages as acknowledged religious and social principles, a practice that is in accordance with progressive digital activism that is rooted in religious traditions. In contrast, @cerita_parapuan relies on collocation to allow the account to convey its narrative without intervening in theological or structural debates, which is consistent with its institutional positioning that prioritizes women’s self-actualization in the digital culture. This study broadens the scope of intersemiotic complementarity within digital media studies and points out the ways in which social media platforms reinterpret historical legacies that influence contemporary gender discourse.