Subverting suburban modernity, the SHOWTIME television series Weeds invites its audiences to situate their opinions about marijuana amid spheres of bourgeois soccer-moms, class politics, turf wars, raw economics, violent milieux, and multiculti heterogeneity. I argue that Weeds encourages us to "smoke the Other"; that is, to hesitantly accept difference, in line with many drug circles' etiquette. The phrase "smoking the Other" is a critical alteration of bell hooks' (1992, Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press) conception of whites' ethnic "devouring" as "eating the Other," a rather rigid schematic itself problematized by Weeds' transgressive self-conscious playfulness with stereotyped ethnicities, loopy plotlines, and counterhegemonic dialogue. Cultural/political implications follow.
Calbris's (2011) Elements of Meaning in Gesture is a gripping rumination on the study of gesture as a socially symbolic act. When we communicate, she writes, we use "parallel sensory pathways, audio-oral and visual-gestural, that interact in multimodal communication, that is, the ensemble of spoken linguistic, prosodic, intonational, gestural, postural, and facial activity [in which] participants engage [.. .] when they 'talk'" (p. 5). Treading respectfully on the groundbreaking framework lain by structuralists and poststructuralists alike (
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