Galore is a “conceptual typeface” designed to help explore the roots of
misconceptions about women propagated through contemporary
vocabularies of Western culture. As Triggs explains in Baseline: Issue 20
( 1995 ), “Pussy Galore is an ‘interactive tool’ which invites response and
urges you to talk back, challenge, and reassess, not only [about] how
women have been constituted by language, but also the structure of
language itself.”
Pussy Galore is not, however, a typical typeface—in fact,
“typeface” may be the preferred description because it functions in relation
to a keyboard but an inaccurate one because Pussy Galore bares no relation
to a conventional alphabet. Rather, it is a clever commingling of Otto
Neurath’s Isotype system of the 1930 s and a sampling of printer’s cuts and
dingbats. The pictographs and word pictures that comprise the Pussy
Galore font are fragments of narrative that individually serve as stop signs
and, when fashioned together, as vehicles for various archetypes and
stereotypes.
The keyboard is employed to create pathways in order for the user
to make references and associations with the characters of the font. It
acknowledges the conventions of language (e.g., vowels, consonants, upper
and lower case) and uses shift, option, and normal keys to launch functions
that allow for additional layers of exploration. For example, conventional
“level one” keyboarding of any word will render a string of ideological
statements (graphic picture boxes that frame such words or sayings as
“sisters,” “rights,” “grrrls,” “mother,” “power,” “Thelma & Louise”).
Progression through each additional keyboard level takes the user through a
journey into what Triggs describes as a multilayered web of associations and
representational sets of ideas about women, such as the following:
Level 1 normal= empowerment of women
Level 2 shift= ugly stereotypes
Level 3 option= personal choices
Level 4 shift+option= vulgar and sexual languageThe complex layering of messages embedded in this font,
including fragmented line drawings of the female anatomy, gives users the
chance to make serendipitous juxtapositions through random access or
specific polemical statements by deliberate applications. Asterisks appear
on selected icons/words indicating additional strata of information, such
as textual quotes or images-sequences, which are accessed through other
operating programs contained in the disc’s suitcase. Accessing these
alternative strata, the user is allowed to highlight, among other things, a