Gender-image

I think gender is a product of media ecology as much as any specific linguistic strategy. Images, as transportable immutable objects of representation operate as vivid, visceral valorizations of ideal gender by the fact of their movement. Much about gender norms operating in a binary have the features of an image in themselves: utter stability (ahem: like a posed picture), requiring repeatability (unchanging in each viewing). Additionally, the image as an object of reproduction, and movement between places regularizes gender in a way previously unavailable, a particular sense of not only vertical (for a particular person or place) stability, but also horizontal stability in multiple places, across space. That authorizes gender regulations in a state/administrative context, providing a common referent for political consent mobilized around gender. Reproducibility of images, and their increasing prevalence provides the script, or perhaps the stage, across with the mobilization by performance of gender occurs.

Duncan