[Inscription of the Girly Man - robotics, software, concrete / 2005] A computer-controlled machine carves the surfaces of 150 pound, cubic foot, blocks of concrete with its hammer drill. Each block is lifted onto the machine in turn and held inside its mechanism. The drill moves in a path across the block's surface and laboriously traces out the words "girly man" in various configurations. The marked blocks stand on one side of the machine while the intact blocks lie in wait at its other side. A wall separates the controlling computer from the machine and the blocks. How is it that image and the epithet have replaced rhetoric as the stuff of American politics? This is the question proper to Schwarzenegger's exploitation of the insult "girly-man" in order to attempt to force the recalcitrant state legislature to assent to his budget proposal. The logic of rhetoricity somehow does not apply, and his epithet is immunized against critique whether based on observations of it being contradictory (since the legislators who are called weak are those who are strong in their opposition) or impolitic (since the insult is both sexist and homophobic). It is not sufficient to simply enumerate the casualties of this change in the political landscape (women, gays, immigrants, the poor, people of color, etc., and then debate and political discourse itself) or to note the effectiveness of the strategies, but it is important, because the invisibility of these, both the changes and the casualties, are at least one reason for the effectiveness of the techniques. |
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