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Robbie B. H Goh

Sword play: The cultural semiotics of violent scapegoating and sexual and racial othering

Keywords: swords, commodity fetishism, anachronism, sexuality, Race, gender

The abiding cultural significance of swords, in an age of technologicallysophisticated weapons of mass destruction, is as much a semiotic puzzle as it is a socio-psychological one. The semiotics of swords displays certain features — commodity fetishism, the business speak of ‘cutting edge’ performance, primitive vitality, and related elements — that reveal the doubleness of desire in market society, the simultaneous desire to negate the capitalist present in favor of a primitivist past, together with an invigoration of the present through tropes of violent conflict. The edginess of swordsemiotics also marks certain points of cultural instability, in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, evincing an incessantly transgressive impulse.

Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2006, 06/2006
Pages: 69 - 94

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