ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at multicultural emojis as a set of visual objects in digital communication whose function is understandable in the framework of neoliberal mind engineering, which stabilizes the superiority of Euro-centric reading of the human body. Mind engineering is considered here as a purposeful process of mental orientation through peaceful means of control. First, a look at neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization as a discursive force that forms the context of emojis as a ‘universal language’ will be provided. Next, two visual codes embedded in the representation of diversity in this universal language will be examined: color categorization and the Vitruvian Man body template. Rooted in problematic understandings of race during the transatlantic slavery and Jim Crow eras, color categorization involves assigning specific colors to human subjects and attributing characteristics to them based on their perceived race. The Vitruvian Man body template, originally conceptualized by various artists, most notably Leonardo da Vinci in 1487, represents traditional ideals of Caucasian body proportions against which other bodies are measured and categorized as normal or abnormal. The chapter concludes that the use of these elements in a visual set that is called a universal hieroglyph of modern times helps the distribution of neoliberal discourse based on which diversity is accepted to the extent that the traditional standards of the Western reading of the human body are not disturbed. With their visual codes in picturing diversity, multicultural emojis distribute a visual language that engineers minds in the direction of assimilation to a Western conception of diverse human bodies which upholds the idea of white supremacy.
