identity politics
today identiy politics and reclaiming of language came up several times. First of all I was at kims house curdled up on her coach after a rainy adventure at the taste of south asia reading an ariticle on fashionable bigotry. It was talking about the backlash from political correctness, and how young artsy scensters are using racial slurs in a "trendy" mannor. Educated intelligent 20 somethings are using words like nigger spic, faggot etc. in an apparently ironic way. As I read this article I could picture a few people who fit this discription perfectly. It really frustrates me to hear privildged white kids saying these things but thinking because they understnad where these words came from they are not beign bigotes. Well this lead to a discussion on reclaiming language, R was saying that she is uncomfortable with women who reclaim the word bitch and slut, because these words are still used in oppressive ways and she feels that women who use them are self deprecating. She felt similar with the word queer. I talked about the empowerment and strenght one can get from reclaiming these words. I went into my whole queer as an anti-indenity to be more inclusive . . . . acknowledging how it has become an idenity therefore has its own set of problems of exclusion and it is no longer as counter-culture. There was discussion around the reclaiming of nigger which I will let kim then you herself so I don't get her ideas wrong here. Basically the discussion came down to a few points. First of all, recaliming words such as bitch, slut, queer coudl be done if one put thought into what it was ment and what it means for them. And although these words are still used as insults, one can reclaim them, but for one to understand how it was powerful and not self depregrating, there would have to be diolgue. The second point was that in our society there is not enough thought or diolgue which might result in a misunderstanding of the theory of reclaiming language. Thirdly, it would seem that those who are doing the reclaiming would have to participate in much diolgue and expalining what these words ment to them, and althought this is important, it can be tiering. As many of us know to be the token of a minority have to contiuously be expalining a race, gender , sexuality etc. issue to your circle or group gets tiring and you wish that these people coudl just pick up a book, think a little bit, learn somehtings on there own and not depend on the outspoken minority to do all the work for them. Bascially it came down to the simple idea that we should respect how people identify themselves, and refer to people as they want to be referred to. Yes this does take energy and thought but if we are still going to have catigories we have to respect each otheres identies. So person X wants to be called black, person y wants to be called a person of colour, person z wants to be called an African Canadian. So be it.
Well this continued when I got home, when sal showed me a chat converstiaon he had with this girl he is in loose contact with. She was telling him about going to a resturant that has asain transvestites who worked there. When in fact they were drag queens. Well she is a psy student and according to her the dsm calls them tranvestites and therefore so will she. She could not see how that word was not approprate and offensive in this context. She did not understand how the dsm has been used to pathologize queer people in the past and still does, and she may be perpetuating this pathology with her terminoology. And she said that she doesn't care how these people perfer to be identified as because in her science world they have a term for this and she wants to kept it consisitant blah blah blah . . .
Basically from the article, my conversation with R and kim, and this chat with sal and psy girl, it comes down to people seem to think that they are intelligent enought to know what is and isn't appropriate with out taking into consideration how indivuals and groups experience this language. The idea of fashionalbe bigotry really upsets me the most, because it is coming from people who hypothiticlaly shoudl know better. And it is this knowledge that they have that they think they have the freedome to abuse language. I have talked to people who fit into this catigory. There responce is we know each others politics, and we know that we arn't bigots. We understand how racism, sexism, homophobia etc works. And because we allready know this we can joke around it is ok. They get upset when "ignoramt" people use thise words of hate, but they are allowed to use them themselves. This includes things like a queer person calling a situation gay to that same person using nother degroitory words that they cannot claim any affliation with.
Basically if we have going to make change towards hate we have to ensure that we are really careful with our language . . . there is going to have to be much diolgue, way beyond the therotical discourse of accedemia. hate can never be trendy.
