How to be a cunning linguist

Oh me, oh my, has there been some trouble in the internets lately. It seems some of my fellow feminists are really unhappy with what they see as an unfair and elitist desire from some of my other fellow feminists to be actively using and articulating specific language terms, such as intersectionality, and cis/cisgendered. Some feminists, myself included, would see these terms as part of what we call ‘inclusive language’. This means for example that using ‘cis’ means we acknowledge that not every person was born into the gender s/he was then assigned. Or it might mean that when we talk about oppression by the patriarchy (I personally prefer the term kyriarchy, just so’s you know) we are talking about how different oppressions can intersect with each other – so for example we are aware that if you are a black, gay, poor woman you might have more bullshit to cop off the patriarchy than, say, a white, straight, middle-class woman. For some, this language is beyond the pale. It is decried as being unfairly complicated or overly academic, or, conversely as not compatible with certain tenets of feminism. I just want to say a few words on how much I disagree with this.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I have a degree, and a Master’s, and am studying for another Master’s. My first degrees were in English Language and Literature, and my second MA will be in International Politics and Human Rights. I am – literally – qualified to understand terms such as cis and intersectionality. I acknowledge that. I have read Kimberle Crenshaw’s excellent work, and I am a long-time lurker and very, very occasional commenter on Shakesville, which is where I first saw the term, ‘cisgender’. Now, given my academic background and general nerdish passion for language, it is perhaps understandable that when I saw these terms I got intruiged, then excited, then educated. That’s my reaction and I fully understand that is not everyone’s reaction. Learning new terminology is not fun or even easy for everyone, and I can understand someone saying, basically, ‘I don’t want to have had to gone to University to understand someone’s argument’.

I get that.

But here’s the thing – I promise you you don’t have had to. The way I have explained the two concepts up in that first paragraph there? I am fairly confident that pretty much anyone who doesn’t have a cognitive learning disorder or bad faith would understand what they mean. Some of the more academic articles on intersectionality will indeed be difficult to understand – that is because they are academic articles. That’s fine, they should be complex and challenging. Some of them will be easier to understand because they have been written more in the style of a blog post, or a newspaper column. That’s fine too. The conversation isn’t finite or monolithic, and it shouldn’t have to be. Because basically, what does this all come down to in the end but respect for what people are telling you about their lived lives?

Here’s the first thing I think about all this, and I’ve made much the same argument before in these pages. If you are white, and a person of colour says to you, ‘you know, that thing you said – it’s kinda racist’; or if you are straight, and a gay person says to you, ‘that was a little bit homophobic’, or any other example of this kind, basically you have two available reactions. You can be all, I AM SO VERY OFFENDED I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU’VE CALLED ME [insert insult here]. Or you can say, my god, I am really sorry, I will really have to think about that and try to make sure I don’t say or do anything like that again.

And you know, if you want to use the first reaction, I get that. I’ve done that. You might very well feel a bit hard done by and defensive - no-one likes being called out, it makes you feel shitty. But you know what? The ONLY FUCKING ACCEPTABLE OPTION is the second reaction. Even if you really, genuinely feel like the person is wrong and you have never ever in your whole perfect-ally life done or said anything that might be slightly morally dubious. Because the thing is that every time this has happened to me and instead of automatically replying with an indignant retort I have actually gone away and done a little bit of actual thinking, whaddya know, turns out I have said or done something fucking wrong. Admitting you might be wrong, for most people, myself included, is really hard. Saying sorry is hard. We humans, we are not very good at this kind of deal, most of us, and that’s ok – but it’s not an excuse not to stop trying to be better. Being a good ally doesn’t magically occur overnight, like any decent relationship it is worth some time and effort.

And here’s the second thing I think: I just do not believe that using the terms ‘intersectionality’, ‘cis’, ‘privilege’, ‘WoC’, ‘non-binary’, ‘trans’ and so on excludes me from the feminist discourse. I don’t think this excludes anyone. These are not words that have been invented just so that Twitter users can call other people out (and yes of COURSE there will be some of that, and some of it will be bloody well deserved), they have been invented because language is so fucking exclusionary of anyone not in the ‘normal’ binary that we need these words. And some of the people who label themselves with these words really fucking desperately need us to use them, way more than straight white feminists like me need to cling on to some fixed terminology because otherwise the world will be too complicated for us.

Last time I checked the world was pretty fucking complicated, after all. That’s good for us; it forces us to engage and learn. Is that always a walk in the park? No, of course not. Does that mean we give up and go home, to our familiar comforts, while people who might need us to be fighting this fight alongside them are literally shut out at the front door? Well, I don’t know about you, but I call bullshit on that.

Sometimes the Shit you are Writing ‘In Defence Of’ Pieces About is Indefensible

Ahhh, the Caitlin Moran issue. For those of you as yet unversed in this latest shitstorm, Moran, a popular (and some would say populist) journalist and feminist commentator has come under recent fire for some deeply troublesome behaviour. This in turn has kicked off an argument on Twitter and in the feminist blogosphere about privilege, intersectionality, snobbery and racism. And I always thought feminists just sat around making ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ protest signs and listening to Ani diFranco! I mean, some of us do do that too, but anyway.

Current hostilities flared up when Moran, who had recently interviewed Lena Dunham, the creator of the HBO show, ‘Girls’, had been asked on her feed the not-unreasonable question of why she hadn’t addressed earlier criticisms of Dunham for failing to include any characters of colour in her show, given that it is set in one of the most ethnically diverse cities on the planet. Moran replied that that she “literally couldn’t give a shit about it”. Now, Moran has a reputation for being pithy and robust, but this seemed to quite a lot of her followers and others on Twitter to simply be a racist viewpoint, because essentially what she was saying was that she didn’t care about the concerns that others had raised about race. Even if you don’t think this was at the very least racially insensitive, it’s hard to see this as anything other than openly hostile and deeply unwise to post in a public forum*.

Moran subsequently got a lot of stick for what she had written – some of it not very nice at all (this is the internet, after all), some of it extremely nuanced and considered: Renni Eddo-Lodge’s piece in the F-Word is especially good in terms of Racism-101. But she also had some people coming to her defence. The latest riposte comes from the editors of the Vagenda in the New Statesman and boy howdy, I’m sure they have no fucks to give about a lowly blogger like me but this was the last straw for me in terms of their brand of feminism, and I have subsequently unfollowed them (which is a shame because before they started to cover more dubious material I had really enjoyed some of their pieces and I think they have some fantastic contributors).

Let me tell you why their piece riled me so, although I would very much encourage you to first, instead of reading a middle-class white woman’s response, go and read some responses from feminist WOC, because there’s no-one who understands more how much ground there is to be lost here than those who’ve actively had it ripped from under their feet before. Ready? Good.

It seems to me that the thrust of the argument in the NS piece is twofold:

·      deflecting criticisms of racial insensitivity by asserting that the discussion of class in Moran’s work and in the feminist project overall somehow overrides this.

·      ‘Reclaiming’ feminism from academia, which is portrayed in quasi-Disney villainess terms.

The first tranch is utterly amazing because it manages to mount a spirited defence of the importance of recognising classism while at the same time denouncing intersectionality as a stuffy academic conceit. They have clearly been reading a lot of Kafka (whoops, that literary reference might be  too ivory tower, my bad). For those of you who’ve never heard the term before, I’ll explain in one sentence, because its meaning is actually not hard at all to grasp. Intersectionality is the idea that people are oppressed for many different and sometimes overlapping reasons, such as race, class, gender, age, mental health and so on. Does that make sense? I want to make it totally clear that I do actively recognise that I myself am speaking from a place of educational privilege, but despite that I truly do not think that concept is a difficult one to understand. Yes, it’s certainly used in gender studies classes, but it’s also used all over the internet. If you are able to use Google you will be able to find out what it means in about ten seconds.

The piece actively places class (although it conflates class with poverty, which is not a wholly accurate picture) in a hierarchy where it supercedes other handicaps. The point of intersectionality is to say, look at all of the ways in which the power structure is holding us back – and working on one of them at a time will not get us very far, but if we tackle them all then we raise the overall standard of our entire society for everyone in it, because no-one’s needs have been ignored. Now it’s completely fine if you don’t agree with that ideology, but to dismiss it completely is to have an argument in bad faith.

It’s also not the best idea ever to demonise the idea of academic feminism as “stuffy” and “almost incomprehensible”. Every single academic discipline in the humanities is elitist and intellectually difficult at the hard theory end; this is an inexorable fact of learning. Academic theorists will regard a book which is a journalistic personal memoir as much as it is a feminist work as a non-academic book not because they are being snobs but because it is exactly that – a non-academic book. This doesn’t mean that they are dismissing it, just that they probably wouldn’t put it on a Masters syllabus, just as the Vagenda Magazine probably wouldn’t print an extract from Julia Kristeva. It might just be me, but I fail to see what’s wrong with that.

But the worst thing about this article is the ‘this concept is too elitist, you’re picking on a working class woman because she can’t be expected to understand these ideas’ subtext, because this is FUCKING INFURIATING. As Zohra Moosa points out in her piece linked above, “'working class' does not equal uneducated”. This idea is just so goddamn offensive I don’t know where to begin so I’ll let Moosa have the money quote on this one too, and it’s a good one: “the idea that she shouldn't be called out to have a more sophisticated feminist politics because she grew up working class or because some of her readers don't have MAs in gender studies is patronizing”. To say the least. It also goes without saying that quoting the phrase “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”, which is from a widely circulated and high profile piece by a prominent feminist, Flavia Dzodan, without a citation is really fucking bad form.

Look, no-one likes to see figures they admire get criticised, much less accused of racism. But here’s the rub – there are two ways to handle that kind of thing. One is to go on the defensive and write an impassioned plea supporting said figure and attempting to steer the dialogue away from the thing you find most difficult. The other is to shut up and listen. Here’s a maxim I try to follow as a white person and human being – when people of colour tell you that something’s a bit racist, then the chances are it’s a bit racist, because no-one understands the cause and effect of racism better than its victims. Full disclosure, I don’t always get it right either, because, y’know, I live in this fucked-up society too where I have subconsciously swallowed all the bullshit messages about the superiority of my skin-colour and my class and sometimes that poison comes to the surface. But you know what I do when it does? I listen. And then I bloody well apologise, because I really do fucking wish my ‘fellow’ white women would stop defending the indefensible.

 

*although of course probably far more dangerous to be having these thoughts in a private forum, all told.