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Queer

What is vexillology? http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/vexillonaire/

Here are some resources for researching LGBT+ flags, you can also feel free to look for yourself: http://clarebayley.com/2013/06/a-field-guide-to-pride-flags/ https://40.media.tumblr.com/dff6d2a2faa854093406a1bc9c764d65/ tumblr_nsj41eIYWj1rwmhjvo3_540.png http://mashable.com/2014/06/13/lgbt-pride-symbols/#9sTonSBoqgqE http://savvyred.deviantart.com/journal/Pride-Flags-Colors-explained-379547414

+ please feel free to research your own.

Questions to consider: 1. What formal features of the flags stand out to you? How can we read (interpret, and not merely describe) the visual aesthetics of LGBT+ flags?

2. What subclassifications can we locate in the genre of LGBT+ vexillology? What are the disputes and struggles related to these subclassifications?

3. There are numerous active online communities of amateur vexillologists designing gender and flags, and we can see a proliferation of these flags in the past ten years. Why do people design flags? How does a flag serve to create a sense of legitimacy validity? Why is there a vexillological resurgence now (or, ca. 2006 onward)?

4. Vexillology is most often related to nation-states, but can also be traced back historically to European . In both cases, a visual icon is used to represent a family: either a literal bloodline in the case of medieval and premodern heraldry, or a national “imagined community” in the case of nation-state flags. How can we think about LGBT+ flags as working to create and coalesce not just a social group but a kinship group?

5. LGBT+ flags are a uniquely American phenomenon. While Gilbert Baker’s now-classic flag has made its way around the world, other gender and sexual identity flags appear in the American context. Even when the rainbow flag travels, it is often recontextualized by local vexillologists: for instance, the South African pride flag, designed by Eugene Brockman, merges the rainbow flag with an outline of the South African flag (recall that post-Apartheid South Africa named itself the rainbow nation during the struggles for racial equality of the 1990s). If LGBT+ flags are, in a certain sense, universal, why do they remain rooted in the American context? That is, what might be the motivation to describe and represent local variants of marginalized sexual and gender identities?