Are we all lurking in each other’s sign

Are we all lurking in each other’s sign? is a recurring question through which Sofia Papastergiadis tests the boundaries between identities. The phrase begins with the everyday signs that assign people to categories, then opens onto gender, family, language, desire, and belonging. Rather than offering a settled answer, its repetitions make classification itself unstable: each person may inhabit, cross, or be read through more than one sign.

Public signs and private names

The question first takes shape as Sofia thinks about the signs on public toilets. Their lists of gendered labels move across languages—Gentlemen and Ladies, Hommes and Femmes, Herren and Damen, Signori and Signore, Caballeros and Señoras—and make identity seem at once widely shared and dependent on local conventions. The question of whether people lurk in one another’s signs follows this catalogue: a category that appears to define a person may also conceal overlap, uncertainty, or an identity the sign cannot accommodate.

That uncertainty reaches into family address. When Sofia is asked whether she calls her mother Mama, she answers no. At a consultation, Rose Papastergiadis accepts being addressed as Rose, insisting that it is her name and that her daughter uses it. Dr Gómez notices this choice and asks Sofia about it. The exchange shows naming as a small but consequential negotiation: the familiar family label is not inevitable, and the name Rose claims for herself does not cancel her role as Sofia’s mother. The expression’s concern with signs therefore includes forms of address as well as public symbols.

Medusa and the limits of gender

After leaving a physiotherapy room at the Gómez Clinic, Sofia sees a yellow swimming flag on the beach below and thinks of Medusa. She imagines the figure confronting the loss of admiration for her beauty and wonders whether she would enter through the door marked Ladies or Gentlemen, or their equivalents in other languages. The question of which sign could contain Medusa turns a familiar monster into a figure at the boundary of gendered classification. Sofia also wonders whether Medusa might have more power as a monster, and connects that possibility to her own habit of trying to please everyone. The signs do not merely describe identity here; they mark the pressure to become legible to others, and the possibility that refusing that legibility might carry its own power.

The clinic and beach give this reflection a material setting. From the mountain, Sofia sees the yellow flag planted in coarse sand; nearby, a cleaner sandblasts blue graffiti from the clinic wall. The fading marks and the warning flag are different kinds of signs—one erased, one signaling danger—yet both prompt Sofia to ask where an identity or history begins and ends. Her question remains open rather than resolving Medusa into a single category.

Desire across roles

The expression returns as Sofia considers Juan, whom she has come to love. To her, he carries several roles at once: he tends the wounded in the injury hut with ointment, and she experiences him as maternal, brotherly, sisterly, perhaps paternal, and also as her lover. Her description does not settle on one role to explain their intimacy. Instead, the question about signs gives form to a desire that crosses the divisions those roles might seem to impose.

An airplane overhead extends the same instability into ordinary language. A male pilot Sofia met at the Coffee House had told her that an aircraft is referred to as she; his work is to keep it balanced and respond to its lightest movement. Sofia recalls that, after they slept together a week later, he too proved responsive to the lightest touch. The shift from machine to gendered pronoun and then to bodily intimacy makes language part of how people imagine and enact relations. Sofia admits that she does not want greater clarity: she wants things to be less clear. In this context, ambiguity is not simply a failure to classify but space in which desire can exceed a single name.

Bodies, inheritance, and situated knowledge

Sofia’s reflections on signs coexist with the practical work of caring for Rose. In the injury hut, the hum of a small fridge leads her to wonder whether it contains sparkling or still water; she is continually looking for ways to make water more right for her mother. The search for the right kind of water is not identical to the question of gendered signs, but it shares the expression’s attention to how categories meet lived needs. A label may distinguish one thing from another, while care depends on noticing what this particular person requires.

Her sense of identity is also shaped by divided family inheritance. When she steals and prepares a dorado, Sofia describes the Greek side of her family as knowing how to gut a fish without consulting Google, and imagines that side catching plaice in the shallows of the Aegean. She sets this alongside the Yorkshire side, associated with buying fish from trawlermen who had endured Arctic winds. These histories do not merge into one uncomplicated identity; both remain present in the same act of preparing the fish.

Language makes that inheritance audible when Rose speaks Greek to Sofia at a meeting. Sofia remembers learning Greek from about the age of three, rarely speaking it at home, and working hard to erase it after her father left. Yet the language has continued in conversation with her, and Rose uses it to make a joke about being born in Yorkshire, ending in English with the line about not owning a whippet. The exchange briefly gives mother and daughter a shared complicity, even as their apparent ease masks how unhappy they are. Across such moments, Are we all lurking in each other’s sign? names no final answer; it keeps open the friction between the categories people inherit, the ones they choose, and the relations that exceed them.