[Ads-l] Is "Jezebel" a racist name?

[dave at WILTON.NET]

I concur with Chris and Tomas.

A term can be both misogynistic and racist, and trying to tease apart which facet is worse is both a fool's errand and one that can only lead to making one or both of them more acceptable. 

This strikes me as parallel to, or even an aspect of, the intersectionality debate in feminism.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Chris Waigl
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 12:01 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Is "Jezebel" a racist name?

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 5:24 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> [...] and leaving aside the question of racism—it’s clear (to me at
> least) that the term is more obviously misogynistic than racist. That 
> additional dimension [...]


I think to take account of the impossibility to do what you're trying to do here, that is to cleanly separate misogyny and racism into dimension as if we were talking vector calculus or linear algebra, the portemanteau misogynoir has been coined.

My impression parallels that of Tomas Alvares. There's a lack of the capacity to talk about these topics with sufficient insight here, and a lot of defensiveness, which can't fill the gap.

Chris

--
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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