A Xmas card from Ann Burlingham, sent from Queensland:
Marital relations among the penguins
Archive for the ‘Language and gender’ Category
A bread maker, Alan?
March 20, 2018Divine Bodies
March 20, 2018
Call me by your name
March 1, 2018The Mother Goose and Grimm, from February 21st:
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A joke playing on use and mention: Grimmy mentions the name of the Oscar-nominated movie Call Me by Your Name, but Ralph understands him to be using the expression call me your your name, so he calls Grimmy Ralph.
That leads us to the movie and so to a thicket of issues about language, sexuality, gender, and the law.
LGBT news from Stanford
January 19, 2018(A posting delayed by assorted computer upheavals at my house and a monster cold, which has caused me to sleep 11 hours a day. In any case, LGBT news bulletins, but no sex at all.))
News from Wednesday the 10th, the monthly Happy Hour! of Stanford’s QUEST group:
(#1) Logo provided by Ryan Tamares for the QUEST website
The gathering (almost all staff these days, and very heavy on librarians of various sorts) was our 8th anniversary event, a return to the Old Pro, a sports bar just up Ramona St. in Palo Alto from my house (yes, a sports bar, but it’s convenient to Stanford, lots of parking, and the CalTrain).
The triumph of confidence over expertise
January 11, 2018A J.A.K. cartoon in the January 15th New Yorker:
Classic mansplaining, right down to the interruption.
The Unusual Two
November 29, 2017In the tradition of Judi Dench and Vin Diesel (in a posting of 3/29/15 here), an unlikely pairing of actors in an episode of The Twilight Zone: Elizabeth Montgomery and Charles Bronson. Two gender icons of pop culture, early in their careers — a few years before Montgomery started her role as Samantha Stevens on the fantasy tv sitcom Bewitched, about the same time as Bronson broke through as Bernardo O’Reilly in the movie Western The Magnificent Seven.
Gendered moments in the comics
October 25, 2017Gender stereotype time: a recent Calvin and Hobbes re-play, with Calvin expounding on the art of girls vs. boys; and a classic Zits (in two parts), on gender differences in same-sex interactions:
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(#2) Sara and D’ijon
(#3) vs. Jeremy and Hector
Irmas
September 8, 2017Hurricane Irma works its way through the Caribbean, now aiming at Florida. There’s nothing useful I can do at this distance, so I’ve been frittering away my time recalling the famous Irmas of my world — your list might well be different — namely Irma S. Rombauer, the Irma of Irma la Douce, and, top of the list, the Irma of My Friend Irma, the apotheosis, oh alas, of the Dumb Blonde stereotype in American popular culture.
Sea foam
September 4, 2017The Zits from August 31st:
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About color naming, and its association with sex/gender. The stereotype is that males use only a small number of color names, but that females draw on a much more diverse collection of names, and that this difference follows from differences — perhaps learned, but perhaps inborn — in the interests and inclinations of the sexes, with females engaged in fashion and interior decoration (where a rich color vocabulary is useful) in a way that males are not.
Revisiting 1: Will McPhail
August 25, 2017Cartoons by Will McPhail, last seen here in three cartoons on 4/15/17, in particular a wordless cartoon (in which God slam-dunks in an angel’s halo). Now from the August 28th New Yorker, this complex exercise in cartoon understanding, drawing on several pieces of very specific cultural knowledge:
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