Body-text fonts, pt. 31: Scala

The font.

Comparisons to Electra and Joanna are apt: not for actual shape so much as for, I dunno, a shared ideal of conspicuous unadornedness.


This early ’90s typeface (in terms of birthday, not heydey) is used here in a collection of writings by an art-history-informed feminist whose “moment” was the early ’90s.

I’m no accomplished gender theorist, but I do think it should count in favor of a theory of gender that it harbors resources to predict, or at least retrospectively explain, the widespread “gendering” of non-persons: words, objects, animal species, topographical features, and so on (in this passage: religion-types).

Typefaces, as designers and marketers often describe them, are manly or womanly.

Scala, Electra and Joanna, if womanly – as their names suggest – are so in a prickly, thorny way.

I’ll post about Electra and Joanna later.