Recommendation: Color Wheels
J.C. recommends…
color wheels
rhetorical device/metaphor
rhetorical device/metaphor
A lot of people (queer, straight, whatever) find the idea of thinking of aspects of gender in terms of a spectrum very intuitive. A color wheel is a spectrum represented as a circle with three or four primary colors rather than two extremes on a straight line.
So if you pick a color for masculine (lets say blue) and feminine (lets say pink) you still have yellow or green left over for another option (like nerdy, flamboyant, feminist, andro, neutral, etc.) plus purple for combos of masc and fem (lipstick butch, tomboy transvestite, whatever) and grey for none of the above.
Posted by Zory on November 17th, 2009 at 08:00 am
Category: recommendations 5 comments »
November 17th, 2009 at 10:35 am |
Colour wheels are such an awesome idea! I’ve been trying to think of ways of describing my views of gender to people who find it hard to see gender as something non-binary. Previously I’d been using kind of a scale with male on one end and female on the other but it always made me feel bad because there are so many people who are outside that scale. The wheel fits much better.
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November 17th, 2009 at 2:03 pm |
Nice metaphor. I think I’ll adopt it.
(one, of course, could go further and use colour solids, but they seem less intuitive…)
BTW, if you want to play with colours in a fun and interesting way, try using GIMP‘s colour selection mechanism, which allows you create all sorts of colour-wheel-like palettes.
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November 17th, 2009 at 6:43 pm |
I love this.
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November 18th, 2009 at 7:19 pm |
sarah, this looks like a good one to share with your mom. also, I love love love it.
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November 20th, 2009 at 11:26 pm |
This is a great way to describe things! Oddly enough, you can justify having a purple day or a fuscia day. I love fuscia days.
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