Episode 649 - Gendered clothing
Aug 21, 2023
When you're drawing people in a webcomic one of the common ways to indicate gender is by outfits, but why are clothes gendered at all and is that a constant?
Topics and Show Notes
Gendered clothing clothing is influenced by many things like fashion, history, custom, occupation, class, culture, and religion, and much less so practicality or biology, contrary to popular belief. All these things have gendered components that have an influence on the clothes people wear and the way they present themselves. There are no constants in gendered clothing, the idea that men have short hair and wear trousers and women have long hair and wear dresses for example was thought to be a constant in the 20th century but that was utter nonsense since even IN the 20th century there were plenty of examples of people doing the opposite with mainstream styles all over the world, let alone all throughout history.
What we associate with “masculine styles” and “Feminine styles” are also a nonsense because that always changes and is different all over the world, it only applies here and now. People LOVE to rationalise based on current styles and pretend it applies more universally but that's just foolish to anyone who looks at world history. For example the current “masculine” style is for men to be drab, dull and modest in their styles, with clothes that are only dark, bulky and hide the shape of the form, but we know from little more than 150 years ago this was strikingly different, and 200, 250, and 300 years ago it was even more striking!
But we don't have to look that far back for an example! There's the modern myth of the “hair band”. The term is now used to describe flashy heavy rock bands from the 1980s in order to separate them from other musical styles and create the myth that they were unusual. While the truth is far more interesting: “hair band” was a term used at the time to describe British “New Wave” bands like Flock of Seagulls who mainly liked short hair with a long fringe over the eyes. In the 1980s Heavy Metal took over as one of the most popular commercial music styles and this was completely driven by bands that had flashy “glam” stage clothes (the name comes from 1970s glam rock, a different genre). Their popularity influenced all other rock bands. Contrary to modern belief, all rock bands dressed in flashy glam clothes, most especially every single heavy metal band, and all had long hair almost without exception. They were never “hair bands” because ALL metal bands looked like that. The modern myth is simply driven by our need to rationalise what we see now and somehow apply it to history.
We do the same thing when we look back at the long haired men with their high heels and gold capes from the past and question their sexuality, while characters like Buffalo Bill Cody who were the epitome of American masculinity commonly wore thigh high leather boots, leather outfits with fringes, long wavy hair, and a slouch hat! Women in the past have never been limited only to dresses and skirts, there have always been examples of them wearing trousers throughout history. Even gender neutral clothing is nothing at all new: a famous version was the proposed simple suit consisting of a black jacket and trousers for men and women just after the French revolution!
Ironically all of us in the Quackcast have designed our characters with heavily gendered outfits! How do you go with gendered fashions?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Eye Hand Voice - A miles high wall of sound that snakes over the landscape and reaches up to the heavens! Gunwallace builds this tune brick by brick till it blocks out the sun, it’s a mighty effort. Layered with scythe sounds and a driving beat
Topics and shownotes
Links
Special thanks to -
- https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Soushiyo/
-For the addition of then new “other gender” part of our sign up forms.
Some inspiration from Tantz's newspost -
- https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/aug/18/gender-toxicity/
Featured comic:
Masks Comic -
- https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/aug/15/featured-comic-masks-comic/
Featured music:
Eye Hand Voice -
- https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Eye_Hand_Voice - by Kalamitycomics, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 610 - Beauty!
Nov 21, 2022
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so the saying goes but it's absolutely true. There is a layered subjectivity to it based on personal preference, the cultural standards of your community, the ethnic traits of you and your peers, prevailing global fashions in appearance, the dominant archetypes in the media and so on. All these things combine to form our personal subjective ideas of beauty. You can see this yourself if you look at paintings, statues, masks, frescoes and other artifacts that have been produced by all the diverse cultures on earth over thousands of years: there IS no standard, eternal, objective of beauty.
Episode 541 - Masks
Jul 26, 2021
No, not surgical masks, this is about the kind superheros wear, also gimps, masquerades, villains and robbers! Inspired by Pitface and her deep and abiding love of gimp masks. We talk about how common it is to find masks in comics and how comic characters probably wear masks more than in any other media. And most media where characters wear masks is based on comics anyway. What are your fave masks?
Episode 513 - Mask of the Mandalorian
Jan 10, 2021
The Mandalorian is pretty unique in that he keeps his face hidden almost the whole time. This is very rare in TV and movies, the rule is that we HAVE to see the actor's face, so they rarely even keep on hats let alone remain fully masked! Yes, there are examples of it but they're few and far between. It's very cool that they've allowed the character to remain hidden for most of the show and he's much cooler for it because it allows the audience to fill in what he really looks like or just imagine him as a cool faceless avatar of awesome.
Episode 329 - Character Archetypes, the Jung ones!
Jun 26, 2017
Welcome to the the yungle Characters make or break a story. In this quackcast Tantz Aerine brings all her skills as a head-shrink to bear and gives us the low-down on Jungian character archetypes! Jung was a clever Swiss bloke, a contemporary of that strange fellow Sigmund Freud, together they're credited as being the fathers of psychology. What we're chatting about here is a little system Jung thought up to evaluate people's personalities. People just like characters in books can be thought of a mixtures of particular character traits, to whit: The Innocent, The Orphan, The Innocent, The Orphan, The Hero, The Caregiver, The Explorer, The Rebel, The Lover, The Jester, The Sage, The Magician, The Ruler. These are the titles of the traits, the full descriptions can be found on Tantz's newspost, just follow the link bellow in the notes. We had a bit of fun trying to work out what traits define our own characters and then trying to do the same for major pop-culture comic and cartoon characters like Daffy Duck, Superman, Captain America and Batman. Gunwallace's theme for the week was The Dark Crusader: The sun rises on the vast metropolis, slowly sliding up a gleaming skyscraper, and standing heroically upon the very top, his cape blowing in the wind, is THE DARK CRUSADER!
