wordplay, sexism and denial

[Bryan James Gordon]

Amy Sheldon schreef:
> Since ideology is covert and hegemonic, why should we pay attention to
"ideological" denials?

In the dialectic of structure and practice, I suppose I'm a moderate. I
think the traditional feminist argument is very important - that such things
as "son of a" are structurally misogynistic, regardless of the beliefs and
denials of language users. But on the other hand, as an anthropologically
minded linguist interested in "experience", and as a political activist
interested in communicating intelligibly with people, I think listening to,
and even respecting, such denials is important, too, regardless of how "we"
know them to be mere ideology.

Brian King raises a useful strategy for how to make change in this
particular case. It reminds me of something I heard at a conference, about
removing sexual language from insults and pejoratives, so as to interrupt
the devaluing of sexuality - and consequently of sexualised subjects. It's
very difficult, but achievable, to remove unwanted indexicality from one's
speech while still being able to take strong stances. It demands constant
monitoring, though, and a level of semantic precision that is likely to be
read as quite fuddy-duddy in our slipshod era of post-modernist
meaning-manipulation. That is, saying "son of a bastard" is not enough,
because in place of misogyny we have deprecations of illegitimacy and
kinship; instead one would have to say "careless driver" or "inconsiderate
cell-phone user" or "heartless soul who dumped my sister" - directly
commenting on the reason for the stance-taking in order to avoid iconisation
and erasure. Is this the only way out? Would it not eventually lead to new
unwanted indexicals, as forms sediment and shift via practice? Every
conventionalised insult or stance-taking mechanism has "the voices of
preceding utterances" - unwanted (or, in some cases, wanted) indexicality.
The only way to prevent the cycle from repeating itself is to change the
conditions of the cycle. Cycles of euphemisms and politically correct
language, for instance, are never complete, because the pejorative
indexicality of e.g. Native American or African American is still present,
and just gets reattached to the new, politically correct word, forcing some
people to move on to another one.


-- 
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Bryan James Gordon, MA
Joint PhD Program in Linguistics and Anthropology
University of Arizona
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