I picked this cartoon panel of Gonzo from The Muppets going through a door labeled ‘whatever’ after walking past two doors with the labels women and men because it shows how symbols are arbitrary, ambiguous, and abstract.

In this panel, the differently labeled doors represent gendered bathrooms. Here, the illustrations are only labeled doorways, which on their own lack a direct connection to gender. Also, the illustrated labeled doorways are ambiguous because there is nothing specifying the ‘whatever’ doorway leads to a bathroom, the viewer understands this based only on seeing the other labeled doorways. Finally, all three of the illustrated doorways are utilized to represent an abstract concept, gender.

As a result, this illustration showing Gonzo walking through the ‘Whatever’ doorway potentially represents Gonzo’s gender non-conforming status based on the cultural assumptions of the viewer. Personally, I do not have any prior knowledge about Gonzo specifically, and my knowledge about The Muppets is limited only to Kermit and Miss Piggy’s long-standing popularity in culture. Now, with the understanding of what constitutes a symbol, I appreciate the ambiguous dimension of Gonzo’s ‘whatever’ comic panel because one interpretation of the panel may interpret this as exacerbating Gonzo’s ostracized status in this world, while others may interpret the panel as a resonant identifier for how the lived experience feels for gender non-conforming people. As a gender non-conforming individual myself, I interpret the panels as a resonant representation of how gender discrimination subjectively feels because for myself, marginalization is difficult to disentangle from my gender identification, so the panel’s potential for mockery against gender-nonconforming people also resonates with my personal experience. 

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