#social semiotics

[prokopetz]

Some helpful tips for newcomers from Twitter:

Truch your eglevigater so people don't think you're a voke

The main way of planding wardic on Tumblr is merming, so always largan your spithers

You can shooth your resils and lentries to "quotte"

Nobody wants to get darrupted, so sten your correns offly

NEVER GREEB; it's bad hootrum

Remember: we're all in this together

[yamshrub]

As a Stanford student, I've been diving into all sorts of fascinating concepts and ideas, but recently, semiotics has completely blown my mind. I guess I never realized that our entire "reality" is based on signs and symbols. Everything we see, hear, and interpret is just a series of signs that our brains make sense of through specific systems of representation and thinking.

The screenshots above are from a social media campaign I created with CashApp where I interviewed some of my fellow classmates to confront financial illiteracy in a humorous and witty way. I feel that it perfectly encapsulates semiotics in action. The post used symbols and language that resonated with younger people to communicate a message that was easily relatable and understood. Plus, it shows how the meaning of signs and symbols can be influenced by the context and cultural background of the viewer. I mean, taxes are a symbol of financial responsibility, but they also make no sense to someone who's not from the US.

Through this campaign, I was able to use semiotics to bring attention to a critical issue while simultaneously engaging with a younger audience. It just goes to show that semiotics doesn't just apply to photography, but to social media and advertising too. As Salkeld explains, it's not just about recognizing signs and symbols, but about understanding the meaning behind them. And I think this campaign definitely accomplished that.

[transgenderuwo]

"Marginalized men can be misogynistic too" yeah this is true but you failed the dogwhistle test. The fact that this specifically calls out marginalized men instead of everybody, regardless of gender and marginalization, is a dogwhistle against marginalized men (and in this website's context, transmascs in particular) being allowed to talk about how badly we're treated. Lo and behold, the post that singled out and victim-blamed marginalized men instead of acknowledging that society as a whole molds everybody to be misogynistic ends up teeming with openly racist, sexist girlboss authoritarians who are one thesaurus away from letting themselves ~progressively~ babygirl-post about Manifest Destiny ideals.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section I, Ch. 3 "Language and Knowledge in Everyday Life"

summary of "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn't link to individual posts correctly

I. Human expressivity can be concretized/objectified ("objectivation") and therefore the subjective can be made part of a shared objective reality.

II. The reality of everyday life is filled with, and possible because of, these "objectivations."

III. A "sign" is a special case of objectivation, in that it is explicitly intended to serve as an index of subjective meaning.

IV. Signs are clustered in systems, and as objectivations have a property of "detachibility" from the here-and-now; "a dance is less a part of the dancer than a snarl is a part of the snarler."

V. Spoken language i.e. vocal signs is the most important sign system compared to eg. gesture, movement, artifact, etc; it is language because of detachibility

VI. The detachibility of language lies in its ability to communicate meaning beyond the subjective here-and-now.

VII. Languge also possesses a quality of rapid reciprocity in face-to-face interaction; subjectivity can be synchronized. I also hear myself; my subjectivity becomes more accessible to me in conversation. "Men must talk about themselves until they know themselves."

VIII. Language has its origins in, and mainly references, shared objective reality. It is external and coercive; it imposes patterns in order to be successful as communication; it anonymizes as it becomes more broadly applicable.

IX. Language also integrates different aspects of everyday life into a more meaningful whole - "here and now" can also be "this and that," "then and now", etc.

X. Language can integrate non-reality as well, eg describing a dream embeds a disjoint "reality" into everyday reality.

XI. A theme that spans realities in this way can b defined as a "symbol." The linguistic mode that manifests these symbols is "symbolic language," characterized by maximal detachment from everyday reality. Religion, philosophy, art, science are examples of such symbolic languages/symbol systems, and are essential constituents of everyday life.

XII. The structure and usage oflanguge defines (precisely or loosely) "zones of meaning" or "semantic fields" eg the tu/vous dichotomy in French defines zones of social intimacy, or occupational languages (medicine, engineering, etc) define their own zones, etc. Semantic fields represent stocks of social knowledge.

XIII. Semantic fields representing social relational knowledge allow "placement" i.e. social role definition

XIV. Since much of everyday life is dominated by the "pragmatic motive", much of social knowledge consists of "recipes" (procedures, heuristics, algorithms) for resolving or addressing social problems/situations.

XV. Social knowledge is differentiated by degree of familiarity: that which I do more, I understand more fully/embody the semantic field more fully.

XVI. These semantic fields are taken as "valid until further notice" i.e. until they cannot provide a routine to handle a given situation.

XVII. The semantic fields I embody - the fraction of the social stock of knowledge that I possess - is a lucid zone behind which there is a background of darkness, that which I do not and in many cases cannot know.

XVIII. Semantic fields are also structured by relevance; what is and is not relevant for me overlaps, or doesn't, with other folks relevant semantic fields; relevance is also contextual.

XIX. Semantic fields are also unevenly distributed: that which I know, others may not, and vice-versa - thus knowledge of the distribution of knowledge is an important part of social knowledge.

----

Notes:

re: III and XI - discussion of signs/symbols may be borrowing from semiotic theory here, but usage seems different from what I recall of my (limited) reading

re: VII - echoes of Paul Graham on essay-writing - expression is creation/crystallization/objectification

re: IX - language flattens the past and brings it into the present - the "depth" of social reality/semantic fields is always apprehended in the present - holograms on the surface of a black hole, an infinitely small layer of present knowledge that is refreshed by objective artifacts - including people - but has no existence outside of now

re: XII - semantic field has analogy to electrical/magnetic/gravitational fields of physics? it stores… something, it grows and shrinks, it can dissipate, it is carried in a medium, etc…

re: XIV, XV - Herbert Simon - interfaces - abstraction of knowledge: i make a phone call but do not need to know how phone system works - Sherlock Holmes brain-attic analogy

Also re: XV - increasing density of knowledge means more need for abstraction/interfaces that "hide" that complexity - there is only so much a person can know, the more complex the whole the less each person can embody ("the machine stops" as a limiting case)

re: XVI - semantic fields can fail OR be contradictory - cognitive dissonance - pernicious social issues as cultural cognitive dissonance eg abortion, gun control - ripe fields of exploitation for political extremists BECAUSE they are complexities that have not been reduced - energy minimization preferred, "answers" needed - the dialectic, thesis and antithesis without (yet) synthesis

[snowlithills]

Theses on Monsters, China Mieville

1.

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors.

2.

To insist that an element of the impossible and fantastic is a sine qua non of monstrousness is not mere nerd hankering (though it is that too). Monsters must be creature forms and corpuscles of the unknowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime, delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is godhead.

3.

There is a countervailing tendency in the monstrous corpus. It is evident in Pokémon’s injunction to “catch ’em all,” in the Monster Manual’s exhaustive taxonomies, in Hollywood’s fetishized “Monster Shot.” A thing so evasive of categories provokes—and surrenders to—ravenous desire for specificity, for an itemization of its impossible body, for a genealogy, for an illustration. The telos of monstrous quiddity is specimen.

4.

Ghosts are not monsters.

5.

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word “monster” shares roots with “monstrum,” “monstrare,” “monere“—”that which teaches,” “to show,” “to warn.” This is true but no longer of any help at all, if it ever was.

6.

Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing modernity, of Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s made things and a variably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything, of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All our moments are monstrous moments.

7.

Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing.

Any bugbear that can be completely parsed was never a monster, but some rubber-mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villain, a semiotic banality in fatuous disguise. It is a solution without a problem.

8.

Our sympathy for the monster is notorious. We weep for King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, no matter what they’ve done. We root for Lucifer and ache for Grendel.

It is a trace of skepticism that the given order is a desideratum that lies behind our tears for its antagonists, our troubled empathy with the invader of Hrothgar’s hall.

9.

Such sympathy for the monster is a known factor, a small problem, a minor complication for those who, in drab reaction, deploy an accusation of monstrousness against designated social enemies.

10.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reaction embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this investment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandizements notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal and more evil.

11.

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of humanity.

[thesiltverses]

I do find it a fascinating and appropriate choice for the most central representative of the government that we see, the guy who seems to be running the show more than anyone else, including the war effort, is the Press Secretary.

this entire situation is made so completely out of propaganda and bullshit that the bullshit artist in chief is now driving the ship. the propaganda matters more than the actual events anyway, so why shouldn't the propagandist be directing things? it's kinda perfect.

I'm glad Shrue got to beat him up a little. (I kinda wish they'd kept going until his trachea collapsed, but one takes what one can get.)

Thank you!

Yeah, it was really important to us both that as the stakes got higher in the series, the final antagonistic representative of the government shouldn't be the High Adjudicator himself or some Musk-esque billionaire CEO of one of the great faiths (although we did briefly consider it). Because then you get trapped in a story about the consequences of toppling an individual tyrant, which is never what the story was about.

So instead we have Carson, who is entirely symptomatic of the hollowness, selfishness, and lack of principle at the Legislatures' heart, but who is not seeking supreme power for himself and whose toppling wouldn't meaningfully affect the power structure, since he's ultimately only a middle manager and priest-like interpreter of the emptiness overhead.

There's a fun bit in Capitalist Realism where Mark Fisher talks about Kafka's bureaucratic nightmares as an allegory for the absence of "final authority" at the heart of late capitalism, which is really what we were going for with the character, in particular the second paragraph:

The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K's official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is. If Kafka is valuable as a commentator on totalitarianism, it is by revealing that there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command. Kafka's purgatorial vision of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes with Žižek's claim that the Soviet system was an 'empire of signs', in which even the Nomenklatura themselves - including Stalin and Molotov - were engaged in interpreting a complex series of social semiotic signals. No-one knew what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular gestures or directives meant. What happens in late capitalism, when there is no possibility of appealing, even in principle, to a final authority which can offer the definitive official version, is a massive intensification of that ambiguity.

[centrally-unplanned]

Just finished The Coffin of Andy and Leyley - at least the two episodes we have so far! A very fun game, I definitely recommend it. The thoughts, spoilers everything:

-- The tone of the game is extremely on point, Andrew & Ashley have such a great trauma-criminal dynamic that never strays too far from being cute first, awful second. Look at these babies! Of course that is the blood of their parents they just murdered for a satanic ritual and/or petty cash, what else would it be?

-- The game nails a pretty niche fetish of mine - no, not the incest part, no judgement but I could do without that just fine. Instead its the weaponization of sex (and other forms of intimacy) to manipulate and break down someone's resistance to your demands:

But, while no shade thrown at the classic controlling doms out there, Ashley wins by being a complete mess and possessing minimal intentionality around her emotional blackmail. Her toxic codependency on Andrew controls her and, as inevitable as the tide, forces her to periodically hurt & degrade him, then compensate via affection bombs & demands. She thrives on his weaknesses such as trauma-nightmares & anxiety as they are places she can slot herself into his pysche as load-bearing support, and sex is set up as another part of that web. Its that lack of control that makes her so attractive - the vast emotional void she is hoping her manipulations will fill is a funhouse mirror version of the physical need intimacy can fulfill.

I will note she is a slightly different from the "Mamimi" (from FLCL) archetype - for the Mamimi, sex is deontological, it is what she needs to cope with her damage. For Ashley it's instrumental, and could be swapped out for another tactic as quick as an outfit change if doing so got her what she really wanted.

Probably also worth mentioning that this isn't an eroge; this dynamic is primarily implication and subtext, becoming text only rarely. Don't want to mislead anyone there.

-- Another standout point is that Andrew himself is *not* the typical wishy-washy boytoy target of his bae's emotional machinations, but instead exactly as toxically codependent as Ashley is, just expressed differently. He thrives on her sense of need and the comfortability of the dyad role her vision for their lives creates for him. What makes him a fun contrast is that he has a "normal" half of his brain that recognizes all of this as fucked up and wants to quit, which often pretends he is being blackmailed by duty or circumstances, but that isn't really true. Where the game excels is that it has multiple routes - neither of which have notably different plot events, but where the different factions of Andrew's brain win out or fade away. Is very tight marriage of narrative and themes.

-- Its also good to add that the incest concept is somewhat foundational. I am not an incest person but I have been on the internet, I am familiar enough with its semiotics, and the "mutual, similar-age, unhealthy codependency" subgenre of relationships when its not incest always struggles with a bit of a believability issue.

So narratives are generally about arcs, sex is about build-up, and that combination means you want to portray the moment a relationship forms, tips into romance, right? And your subjects of choice are two people who constantly cling to each other, destroy outsiders who could challenge their attention monopoly, and psychologically scar each other in order to foster emotional addiction. And they are ~20 yeas old.

Why aren't they fucking already?? They obviously should be fucking. If these were childhood friends, they would be fucking, for years now, easy. You can say they just haven't gotten there yet but that changes the characters, makes them naïve and innocent, that is a narrative constraint you might not want. But if they are siblings...well then there ya go. That is a socially-ironclad excuse for how they got so emotionally close without romantic intimacy, and a reason for them not to cross the threshold (until your plot events make them ofc). Its a fetish that makes your storytelling efficient, not just something that works on the fetish level directly.

(Btw Andrew is not a doormat; that is a lie he tells himself)

-- The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is a classic RPG Maker indie project, and it used its gameplay conventions well. Its essentially a visual novel with RPG exploration elements that offered small puzzles as you traverse from plot point to plot point. They create immersion while rarely being too difficult and dragging down the pacing - it knows they aren't here to intellectually challenge you, but to make the world feel lived. And sometimes - most often in Ashley & Andrew's dreams - the light puzzle elements are very deeply woven into the plot & themes, used for making narrative choices & reinforcing emotional beats. They rarely overstay their welcome, which is refreshing. Its not uncommon for a game to get into trying to "gamify" what should just be a visual novel, and while not perfect Coffin doesn't fall into that trap.

Additionally the creator definitely likes Undertale, and the dream sequences remind me of Flesh, Blood, & Concrete in their colors & abstraction. Good times!

-- It is extremely amusing to google this game for like ending guides or w/e and to be bombarded with the "controversy" of its incest plotline. A: The main duo murder their parents and nonchalantly make a meal of their bodies out of sheer habit, way to not have your eye on the prize. And B: my brother in Christ you clicked on the Incest Game. Why are you on Pornhub complaining about porn??

[effemimaniac]

dude it's actually insane how elon musk bought one of the most recognizable social media brands and just completely stripped it of everything that makes it recognizable as a brand. twitter isn't twitter, tweets aren't tweets. you just "repost" posts now. on X. complete corpo-semiotic ego death.

[macbethz]

I think it’s very interesting that, in America at least, because of tremendously effective anti-smoking education in the span of a generation cigarettes went from this icon of Americana to an indicator of addiction, to be treated the same way society at large treats addicts in general, which is with disgust and social pariahhood.

I have to put the mandatory disclaimer here because tumblr functions like a sneaky genie looking for loopholes in your posts to get mad at but like yes anti smoking education good smoking bad etc. However I think because it is so tied to how American culture treats addiction and morality it has led to this vast cultural divide where nonsmokers view smokers as nonhuman entities worthy of death and lung cancer who are just trying to poison everyone around them like cartoon villains. This discourages smokers from interacting with nonsmokers, and they retreat to smoking spaces where they only encounter other smokers and thus don’t really have a clear path to quitting if they choose too. It really is the same as every other drug.

There’s also a heavier stigma around smoking than vaping even though their differences may be negligible simply because the symbolic associations with the cigarette object itself are so much more strongly embedded. Anyway stop making so many stupid posts abt cigarettes on tumblr dot com so I stop thinking about cigarette semiotics please

[prokopetz]

"Is this anything" I mean, of course it isn't. No thing is a thing in itself; things only become things when community consensus imbues them with thingness.

[mybeingthere]

Isabella Ducrot, born 1931 in Naples,

lives and works in Rome.

She began her career as a painter at the age of 60, and for almost three decades she worked more or less in silence - much of that time here, in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. From her studio you can look directly into the baroque garden in the palace's inner courtyard, a hidden oasis in the middle of Rome where time seems to have stood still.

“Sometimes I enjoy the freedom that comes from not having studied art, the freedom to be ignorant.”

She has traveled to Afghanistan, China, India and Tibet with her husband, and since the 1960s often with the painter Cy Twombly, whose wife Tatiana Ducrot was a close friend. On these trips she collected fabrics over decades - magnificent, sacred, folk. And she has written philosophical, poetic and art-historical texts about them. So it was only natural that fabric would be the subject of her painting, which is now being discovered by the international art world.

When asked whether she was influenced by Buddhism, minimal or conceptual art, she answers in the negative: "I didn't follow anyone. I had no masters, I didn't study at the academy. I'm a self-made woman." She says that Tatiana Twombly, herself an artist and a legendary interior designer, encouraged her and bought her first works, and that Achille Bonito Oliva, one of the most important Italian curators, commissioned her to create a mosaic in the Naples subway in 2005, where Ducrot grew up as the daughter of a noble family. You can sense that she has lived a privileged life surrounded by art and artists. But her pictures of bulbous teapots, her landscapes inspired by miniature paintings, speak of a mystical simplicity, a spiritual experience that is conveyed in the decorative elements as well as in the nature of the material.

"Textiles have to do with something invisible, like breath," says Ducrot, "you don't see it, but you feel it - in the void between the threads." The grid of warp and weft, of crossing threads, which is exposed like a skeleton in the Tibetan shawls, forms an archetypal matrix for Ducrot. In her book "The Checkered Cloth" she describes the fabrics as "textile prayers", "an indestructible connection between spirit and matter" into which thoughts and words are woven. In Isabella Ducrot's work, fabric is a semiotic, poetic, social network of history, stories and myths.

[hadesoftheladies]

Girlhood Is Surveillance

In the imaginations of most men, oppressive policing is done by a military force or officers of a district. Men are deployed, with weapons and uniform, to enforce the will of the state. They use violent means (or the threat of violence) to intimidate. Certain words are banned by the government and uttering them risks being locked up, done away with, killed.

Yet, the most powerful, pervasive, and far-reaching form of surveillance is the reality for most girls.

Oppressed groups typically go through more surveillance than the oppressing class. They are viewed with more suspicion, afforded less allowances, and must work harder to prove themselves worthy of basic rights. The government is aggressively involved. They mandate what schools can teach, what media houses can publish, what public speakers can say.

For girls, surveillance starts before they can walk. This kind of surveillance is an extension of the surveillance her mother endures from her peers. She is dressed appropriately in pink, in bonnets, in frills and baby bows. By the time she is five, she is policed by her closest relatives. She may or may not be allowed to run shirtless like her brothers. Especially when her uncles are there. She must not wear nail polish or she must play with makeup. She must wear tutus and dresses.

This also happens to boys, but in a much different way. The reason I describe girlhood specifically as surveillance is because in a patriarchal, pornified world, the boy's body is neutral, that is, not provocative. Not insulting.

The female body, on the other hand, is semiotically significant. It is a symbol of sex, of desire, of lust (at least as a man experiences it) and thus is wicked, crude, and crass. The girl is surveilled because on the streets, in the home, by anyone who looks at her, who she is is interpreted to be provocative. In other words, her femaleness, naked or evident, is hate speech. Or impolite language. Language that polite society cannot be seen to be having. Her shoulders, knees, hands, thighs, breasts, are pornography.

This is just a fraction of the surveillance of girlhood.

As she grows up, she learns there are ways she must sit, things she must not know, things she must not say, and things she must wear. Her mother (and sometimes father) are the chief police on these things. They watch her, check her before going out, frisk her to make sure the skirt is not rising above her knees, the hijab is in place, etcetera.

On the streets, the girl learns, that she is also being watched by others. Men whistle at her as she walks to primary school. She learns how easy it is to be shamed as a girl. By teachers, strangers on the road, girls in school, boys at the playground. For having hairy legs, a crooked (normal) nose, a bare face, a face that isn't bare, too much height, too big boobs, too small boobs, thin lips or full lips, a flat butt, a butt that shows, etcetera.

She censors her womanhood when it comes. For if her brothers or father see her blood in the toilet, that is her body once again being provocative. Perhaps she becomes aware as a teenager, of the inequality and injustice. If she speaks out, she will be met with a host of police ready to put a stop to it. Her best friend will say, "Some women like looking beautiful. It is not a crime to want to be beautiful. You are judging me." Her mother will say, "Girls libidos don't matter. Sex is not for girls to enjoy, but for men." Her father will say, "Don't worry your pretty little head about things you don't understand." They will all dismiss, all shame, all hush her. They will call her ungrateful, a lesbian (which means social outcast, unnatural, inhuman, wrong), a radical, or a child throwing a tantrum. All of which are threats, whether or not they recognize them as such.

This policing system does not need the use of officers or the military much because the narrative is in society's consciousness. The people will police deviants themselves after the government tells them what the deviants look like and gives them the stakes of noncompliance. This kind of surveillance is also older than the government, if not as old as it is. It's oldness makes it that much more difficult to notice and resist.

The people who love you become the police. They will snitch on you to their peers if you do not conform. Your mother will tell your aunts and grandmother. Your father will joke about you with your brothers. Your sister will tell on you to the popular girls. And these are not the worst kind. Most girls, like every other animal, every other human being, will go the route with the most ease and the best chance at survival.

They will conform. They will cross their legs. Do their hair according to their age. Paint or not paint their nails. Wear the hijab. Wear skirts that go over the knee. Wear the pink. Curl their hair. Smear the lipstick, eyeliner, mascara. Put the powder and glitter on themselves. Wear the heels and stockings. Kiss the boy, etcetera.

And now, because they've been told how closely they're being watched, for their looks, whether their clothes are appropriate or not, whether their mothers are happy or not, whether their brothers feel threatened or disgusted by their pads or their tomboyishness or not, whether they are excelling too much in sports or academia or too little, whether they are smart or not, whether they are fat or not, whether they are acceptable or provocative or not . . . it becomes of paramount importance that they surveil themselves. Because they are in a hypervigilant state. They are in survival mode.

Girls are their own self-police. Harsh on every angle and feature. Because they have been told that people pay special attention to them everywhere they go. And to some degree, this is true. Everyone is easily insulted by femaleness, because femaleness is provocative. Please note, not femininity, femaleness. Femininity is camouflage because it signals conformity. Agreeing with the narrative that insists that the female body is the symbol for sex or motherhood. That the female body is pornography. The women that flaunt their bodies and say, "I am sexy and want you to know it!" are conforming. The women that hide their bodies and duck their heads to show meekness toward their God are conforming. None of them challenge the assertion that the female body is by-default provocative, an invitation to sex, shameful.

Now, surveillance has expanded. You see girls tilting their heads in one direction on their cameras because they believe this is their best side. They all have makeup or makeup filters. That thin their faces and enlarge their eyes. That make their lips a little fuller. They gag themselves and retch up nutrients and food in order to keep themselves safe. Obsessed with beauty and meekness because it is their livelihood. What secures them in society.

And yet . . . does it? Little girls are killed for a little hair showing from beneath their headscarf. Young women are murdered by the men whose advances were rejected. Toddlers are whistled at by grown men on the street. Teenage girls are the sex symbol of the generations in TV shows, movies, music videos. Mothers starve their girls, physically and emotionally abuse their girls, to keep them compliant. Girls have burn marks, scars, wounds from conformity. They have blistered feet and bra lines burned into their ribcage.

The government is not inactive, either. It does not punish femicides. It mandates forced birth. It regulates population by regulating the human female, rather than the male that has been left to run amock. Who starts these pregnancies and is responsible for any statistic for violence in the general population. It ensures that women need men to survive the economy. It ensures that women are successfully sold and bought for the economy. The pimps need their money, after all. And the president needs the pimps. The oligarchs need their workers, too. Workers need mothers to create them and wives to sustain them. Girlhood is the governments business.

A girl will blame herself for how her boyfriend treats her, for being raped. She will then, instead of looking at the world, at the perpetrator, will police herself and other girls around her even more aggressively. Violently.

Surveillance is most powerful when privacy is destroyed and the person made into a data point to be exploited. Girls do not have privacy, for their private parts are taboo discussions in public life. They are offensive discourse and so must be suppressed and regulated.

Girlhood is living under the most extreme and powerful form of surveillance, where everyone is the girl-police, including the girl herself.

[desolationlesbian]

obviously no one cares about the one-off long ago american death note adaption but it still drives me insane that anyone purporting to make a death note adaption would attempt to depict Light Yagami as some cool edgy dyed-hair outsider. Light Yagami is a beloved handsome straight-A student valedictorian golden child that women love who helps his little sister with her homework every night and is the son of a cop. he is the anti-outsider. that's the point. he meets and surpasses every possible standard society has ever set for him (or at least puts great effort into appearing to meet them; see, the numerous dates with girls despite his complete disinterest in heterosexuality outside of how its performance can benefit him) and has no compassion for people who fail to meet those standards, and is outright contemptuous of anyone who does not conform to the degree he does. his perfection and his inhumanity, his totalizing grasp of social approval and his calculating evil, go hand in hand. if you want to adapt Light Yagami to the setting and semiotics of a usamerican high school he cannot be a weird goth kid, he needs to be captain of the goddamn football team.

[vkelleyart]

Hi! Would you ever consider drawing any of Becky Albertalli’s characters? I would love to see Imogen and Tessa or maybe Bram and Simon and I think you’d do a spectacular job!

Hello there! I’m so glad you asked—I actually have drawn artwork of Becky Albertalli’s characters, but I’ve just been completely derelict in my duty to cross post it everywhere, which is negligent of me and another piece of evidence in the argument that someone else should probably be in charge of my social media accounts. Lol

Here is Imogen and Tessa from Albertalli’s amazing book Imogen, Obviously:

So, funny story about this artwork: I had received Imogen, Obviously as an ARC from Becky after I’d left a comment on one of her posts about how excited I was for this book—primarily because “the discourse,” as it is referred to sort of sardonically in the book, still messes with my head when it comes to my own bisexuality. The more public my life becomes, the more I find myself discomfited by questions like “Am I still allowed to be queer if I’m in a straight passing marriage?” Or “Am I queer enough if, when people see me on the street or bump into me in the check-out line at Safeway, they don’t see a semiotically-dressed bisexual, but rather a slightly overwhelmed working mom in a cardigan and a pair of early-2000s capris?”

As soon as the book showed up, I devoured it, and like, I just can’t remember a book that made me feel so seen. Imogen, Obviously tackles queer purity culture so thoroughly and yet so compassionately, that I immediately picked up my stylus to draw Tessa and Imogen (even though I technically lacked the time to do the image as much justice as I would have otherwise like to have done) then posted it to Instagram and Twitter.

And holy smokes, Becky liked this pic so much, she retroactively commissioned the image so she could give out stickers of it on her book tour. She also granted me permission to sell the print in my Etsy shop (it’s not there yet, but soon!). 🥹

So that’s the story you didn’t ask for but which I had to share—because it looks like we both have an appreciation for Becky’s work in common and because I would love to spend more time drawing Imogen and Tessa or anyone from the Creekwood Series. Thank you so much for the ask and for your kind words about my art! 💕

[titleleaf]

[Sex workers in Renaissance Italy] disrupted such straightforward notions about the semiotics of dress. Literary and legislative texts imply that it was common practice for prostitutes to dress in finery inappropriate to their social station, both as an act of display, and in order to 'disguise' themselves, whether as honest women or as virgins. Equally problematically, prostitutes often appear to have transgressed the boundaries between the genders, by wearing men's garments, or adopting a 'masculine style' of attire. Cesare Vecellio in his descriptions of the dress of Venetian prostitutes at around this time stated that towards the end of the sixteenth century there was a trend for them to wear a costume 'which tended towards the virile, because they wear doublets of silk or linen, and men's shirts … silver medals at their neck and some wear men's trousers'. Various explanations can be offered for this practice, but given that as early as 1260 Florentine prostitutes were expelled from the city for having short hair and wearing male clothing, it was evidently a tradition of some standing. In the case of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice, there is evidence to suggest that the trend was at least in part linked to the widespread popularity of male sodomitic relationships, and perceptions that women would have to dress in men's clothes in order to attract them, possibly signalling that a prostitute allowed her clients to perform illegal acts of anal sex. However, we may be in danger of over- interpretation, since this fashion for masculine dress was not necessarily exclusive to prostitutes. In Venice in 1480 'Venetian women' in general were forbidden to wear their hair in the style known as the 'mushroom', 'since by means of this coiffure women conceal their sex and strive to please men by pretending to be men, which is a form of sodomy'. Certainly, my interpretation of the wearing of men's clothing in Rome tends towards the prosaic. About fourteen prostitutes were arrested by the Roman city police between 1594 and 1606 for wearing men's clothing, usually a beret and a cloak, sometimes breeches as well.

From "Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals, and Experiences", Tessa Storey, in Clothing Culture, 1350-1650

[joannerowling]

I would say that no one outside of the US and other English-speaking countries says "I have a gender" as the word gender is technically wholly English word that does not have a direct translation to other languages(no matter how hard the social media/'new sites' try to make it a thing, by that I mean, for example: in my country we don't have a word for gender, we *do* have one grammatical term but while it's used for living things-including humans-it's only ever used as we're learning our grammar in school, no one really uses that term, except now news sites are trying to use it in both biological sense and as the translation for "transgender" and it drives me bonkers to be honest).

So really, the whole gender thing is such a English-speaking world thing; the rest of us when talking about roles imposed on us based on our sex simply say, as you already mentioned, "sex roles".

Side note, but most normies think that gender is a synonym for sex anyway, hence all those "there are only two genders" from the crowd that isn't gender critical just doesn't believe in 1000 genders.

That last paragraph is very important i think, most people use "gender" as just the polite way to not refer to sex directly; that's literally how the word got popularised in English first, as a way to not say "sex". (Protestants… they're just Like That.)

When you start saying stuff like, "gender and sex are not related", you lose 90% of people. Most of them aren't even all that interested in the topic, and you're already signaling that they'll have to deconstruct what they understand on a semiotic level to understand what you mean (not agree with you! just understand). That just doesn't strike me as an efficient way to communicate, let alone convince.