{"id":9204,"date":"2013-03-02T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T17:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=9204"},"modified":"2014-11-14T00:38:47","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T05:38:47","slug":"stick-figures-and-stick-figures-who-parent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/02\/stick-figures-and-stick-figures-who-parent\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick Figures And Stick Figures Who Parent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on our recent posts\u00a0<\/a>on representations of “person”<\/a>,\u00a0I discovered a set of stick figures<\/a>\u00a0from around the world, collected\u00a0by\u00a0Steve Portigal.\u00a0 He has some observations on variations.\u00a0 From a gender perspective, however, they all look more or less like this one from Bali, Indonesia:<\/p>\n

\"bali\"<\/p>\n

What is interesting for our purposes, though, is this Chinese language example from Bangkok, Thailand:<\/p>\n

\"bangkok\"<\/p>\n

Do you see it?\u00a0 In case you doubted it, the fact that the fourth panel includes a stick figure in a skirt (1) proves that the non-skirted stick figures are implicitly men and, on an entirely different note,\u00a0(2) reminds us that men do not take care of children.<\/p>\n

Similarly, these two pictures of warning signs for moving sidewalks (snapped in the Dublin airport) feature “neutral” stick figures, unless a child is involved:<\/p>\n

\"Picture2\"<\/p>\n

\"Picture1\"<\/p>\n

We see the same phenomenon in commercial airplanes, where “flight attendants” still tend to be pictured in skirt<\/a>s.<\/p>\n

Prof. Shaun Huston sent in these photos\u00a0from United Airlines. Everyone’s in pants… except<\/em>\u00a0the person changing a diaper:<\/p>\n

\"IMG_1671\"<\/a> \"IMG_1672\"\"IMG_1673\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Amanda C. sent in another example from a hotel in Sydney. When the stick figures are housekeepers, suddenly they sprout skirts!<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_16\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sophie pointed out that in Holland, bike traffic lights only include images of what most people would recognize as a “men’s” bike, with the bar across the top, thereby managing to gender the traffic signals without including any figures of people at all (images found\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, here’s a counter-example from Malm\u00f6, Sweden:<\/p>\n

\"-1\"<\/p>\n

Emanuelle, who took the photo and submitted it,\u00a0says it’s the only time she can remember that she’s seen a silhouette figure like this with a kid where\u00a0the figure isn’t clearly marked as female. \u00a0We’ve a fun collection of traffic lights featuring female stick figures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’d love to collect more examples!<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on our recent posts\u00a0on representations of “person”,\u00a0I discovered a set of stick figures\u00a0from around the world, collected\u00a0by\u00a0Steve Portigal.\u00a0 He has some observations on variations.\u00a0 From a gender perspective, however, they all look more or less like this one from Bali, Indonesia: What is interesting for our purposes, though, is this Chinese language example […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2088,2100,272,1765,1785,1817,1812,23622,76],"class_list":["post-9204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-gender-work","tag-marriagefamily","tag-nation-australia","tag-nation-indonesia","tag-nation-ireland","tag-nation-thailand","tag-social-construction-symbols","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9204"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65040,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9204\/revisions\/65040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}