Communicating through a set of signals—words, forms, behaviors, signifiers of some kind—that protect the creator from the consequences of openly expressing particular messages. (This specialized definition is distinct from the use of “code” simply to designate the system of language rules through which communication is possible.) Coding occurs in the context of complex audiences, in situations in which some of the audience may be competent to decode the message, but others—including those who might be dangerous—are not competent (or not willing) to do so. Although coding may be undertaken as play (children’s “pig latin,” for instance) or to preserve privacy (signals between lovers, or immigrant elders using their mother tongue when children are around), much coding takes place in situations of significant risk. The traditional creations and performances of dominated cultures often contain covert expressions of resistance—ideas, beliefs, experiences, feelings, and attitudes that the dominant culture would find disturbing or threatening if expressed in more overt forms. Slave songs may express a secret wish for freedom; a gay man’s conversation may conceal his assertion of sexual preference; a wife’s knitting may coverdy protest her husband’s assumption that his activities are more significant than hers. Three kinds of coding—explicit, complicit, and implicit—may be distinguished. In cases of explicit coding, the presence of a code is obvious even to those who cannot decipher it—a dangerous matter in situations of great risk. A letter written in cipher, for instance, announces itself as containing a secret, and thus can invite efforts to decode. In situations of complicit coding, however, the existence of a code is concealed from those outside of the coding group. The code and its uses are collectively determined ahead of time (passwords, code names, a sheet hanging on a clothesline to indicate safe passage on the underground railway) or are drawn from esoteric experience and adopted on the spot (a lesbian’s naming of a local women’s bar; a Jewish American’s conversational use of a Yiddish word). Complicit coding is consciously employed among members of a folk group united by a shared culture and a shared sense of threat. Both explicit and complicit acts of coding are manifestly intentional, undertaken knowingly and purposefully. However, coding need not be deliberate. In the third type, implicit coding, even the existence of a coded message is arguable and may be denied by the creator; not only the message, but coding itself is concealed and may be subconscious. Implicit coding thus raises complex questions about intentionality and about the interpretations that may be constructed both by the original receiving community and by outside observer-analysts such as folklorists. A woman who sews a quilt patch in which Sunbonnet Sue, a traditional pattern figure representing feminine submissiveness, diligence, and innocence, is swallowed by a snake may dismiss her creation as “just a joke”; inferring from contextual knowledge rather than the quilter’s assertion, however, an audience might see an encoded message of feminist resistance to a traditional stereotype. The interpretation of implicit coding often presents a dilemma, since there is neither the signaling of an intention to code nor any open complicity in a coding system; in fact, the performance is meant to pass for an uncoded activity. With careful and respectful scholarship grounded in the specific cultural context of the performance, however, it is feasible to posit at least the possibility that an act of coding has occurred. A context for concealed coding (complicit or implicit) exists when, for a particular individual or folk group, there exists a situation of oppression, dominance, or risk; when there is some kind of opposition to this situation that cannot safely be made explicit; and when there is a community of potential “listeners” from which one would want to protect oneself. However, the identification and interpretation of implicit coding must ultimately remain an act of inference—inference that has potentially serious consequences for individuals and communities and should not be undertaken without care. The coded status of individual texts and performances will often remain ambiguous, and different audiences may disagree as to their interpretation. Nevertheless, it is possible to designate the following strategies of expression that lend themselves to the complicit or implicit coding of messages: Appropriation: adapting to the purposes of oppressed culture forms or materials normally associated with the dominant culture (example: Native American “riffs on the White world” through adaptation of traditional beadwork to decorate such popular mainstream items as baseball caps, Bic pens, and Bingo markers). Juxtaposition: ironic arrangement of texts, artifacts, or performances so that they develop additional, often tendentious, levels of meaning (example: a wife braiding a foot-wiping rug for the firont doorway from pieces of her husband’s old suits). Distraction: strategies that drown out, or draw attention away from, the subversive power of a message (examples: singing lyrics expressing fear or protest in a soothing lullaby; “passing” as a member of the mainstream—a gay man in the military, for instance, emulating masculine stereotypes and taking part in “locker room” talk). Indirection: the many ways in which, as Emily Dickinson put it, one can “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Perhaps the most common strategy of coding, indirection includes metaphor, impersonation, hedging, and metonymy (examples: Mexican American women telling legends of vaginal serpents as metaphoric expressions of sexual fears; Kentucky mountain women singing traditional Anglo American ballads as imper-sonal lessons about how to outsmart men; lesbians making metonymic inquiries about the sexual orientation of strangers by asking if they have been to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival). Trivialization or Minimalization: strategies that understate, minimize, or “normalize” the subversive power of a message, sometimes by employing forms that the dominant culture considers to be unimportant, innocuous, or irrelevant (Examples: telling a joke to express criticism; downplaying the seriousness of conversation by giving it a traditionally disparaging label, such as “gossip,” or “woman-talk”). Incompetence: expressing resistance to the dominant culture’s expectations by claiming or demonstrating incompetence at activities conventionally associated with one’s oppressed culture; associated with underclasses of workers whose labor power is being exploited (Example: a woman claiming she “can’t cook”).
Joan N.Radner
References
Babcock, Barbara, ed. 1978. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. 1993. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.