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Tag Archives: homophobia

Arizona State University: where literacy comes to die

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Recent works of fiction, including Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, depict a future where traditional literacy has become a niche skill, and the general populace relies on simple symbols for written communication. An examination of the graffiti of Hayden Library at Arizona State University leaves one with the impression that such a scenario [...]

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The Sexual Palimpsest of Brown University’s “Rock”

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Brown University’s Rockefeller Library is reminiscent of UChicago’s Regenstein. They’re both rather ugly from the outside, they both have two basements, they both have nicknames (the “Rock” and “Reg”, respectively), and they’re both filled with graffiti mostly written in literate1 English.
In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I collected [...]

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F(l)AGS ARE G(r)AY: socially acceptable homophobia

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

In the 1960’s, before the Regenstein Library was built, racism wasn’t hard to find in the graffiti written in Harper Library and elsewhere on campus. Today, it has been driven into the “private” space of men’s bathroom stalls, along with a number of other comments that would likely be censured by other graffiti-writers, if not [...]

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The decline and fall of the B-level men’s room

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

It’s been about a month since I last wrote about the B-level men’s room (first post can be found here, last month’s update here, though I’ve been back a couple times since). The decline has begun: philosopher wordplay has descended into more penis drawings and an attempt to turn an anti-gay slur into a pun.
Perhaps [...]

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