Sly chicks and troublemakers : car stickers, nonsense and the allure of strangeness

This paper examines the use of personalised car stickers as forms of appropriation that textualise the car. The use of such objects raises the question of how we make sense of other people's appropriations. Rather than see these as texts to be decoded, however, this paper argues that the significance of an increasing number of these stickers lies in their resistance to interpretation. As tactics of nonsense, they threaten the coherence of systems of discourse. This has particular resonance for analysing the growing use of sexually aggressive stickers by young women. The paper suggests that many stickers, despite their triviality, provide an allure of strangeness. Against current theoretical preoccupations with the anxieties around otherness, we suggest that these stickers attempt to allay the anxieties around banality.