a classic bit of old skool visual sociology:

erving goffman, gender advertisements

[warning: this is the entire book, which makes it look really, really long. it is, in fact, not that long, in terms of reading, since there are a lot of pictures of advertisements. thus, your plan should be to read the opening chapters (pp 1-27 in the book, which are pp 13-39 in the pdf) and to get a sense of the seven themes he identifies (they are helpfully listed in the table of contents, with a page referring you to the initial definition, and then leading to some photos. “licensed withdrawal” is given the wrong page number — it actually starts on p. 57). so even if you are hard copy sort of person, reading this online is probably a better bet.]

the reason for offering the entire thing, even if you don’t necessarily look at all of the specific advertisements, or if you think it is too dated (is it?), is to give you a sense of a different model for organizing and presenting visual research. as well as this being a fairly early “classic” in the field…

if you’re sick of white supremacists (and who isn’t?), stop now. but here are a couple of supplementary texts exploring the role of memes and irony for the spread of racist ideas.

and in a totally different form of meme news, here’s a story about how someone’s (flavia dzodan, who you should totally be following on twitter) statement got turned into a meme/slogan, that was then commodified/spread, but she never got any of the profits.

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