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I
once asked a friend who is British what the word "akimbo"
means and he said that it means flinging ones arms about wildly.
His being from the land of the Oxford Dictionary was, at that
time, a good enough credential to me, and I accepted his definition.
Some time later I came across the word again, and in this context,
"flinging one's arms about wildly" didn't seem to fit
the bill at all. I looked it up and found the curious illustration
of "a boy with arms akimbo".
I
became facinated with this image and, after I had created a painting
of it, I discovered that a gay men's group in the US had adopted
this very image as their logo. They had seen, what I had seen
in the image, which is a not-so-innocent kind of provocativeness.
I
developed a habit of looking up the word whenever I found a new
dictionary. I then went to the library and looked it up in as
many dictionaries as possible. Left, are some of my favourite
illustrations. Note how the female subject is looking downcast
and ineffective whereas the male figures look self-possessed and
strong. I was amazed at how the word's meaning changed depending
on the illustration, and hence began my interest in gendered subjectivity
in textbook illustration.
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