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Semiotic Disobedience, Sonia K. Katyal

Sonia Katyal

Nearly twenty years ago, a prominent media studies professor, John Fiske, coined the term “semiotic democracy” to describe a world where audiences freely and widely engage in the use of cultural symbols in response to the forces of media. A semiotic democracy enables the audience, to a varying degree, to “resist,” “subvert,” and “recode” certain cultural symbols to express meanings that are different from the ones intended by their creators, thereby empowering consumers, rather than producers. In this Article, I seek to introduce another framework to supplement Fiske’s important metaphor: the phenomenon of “semiotic disobedience.” Three contemporary cultural moments in …