Sorcha's Scribblings

On the power of language

As part of my school process, I am serving as a peer advisor on the degree committee of another student in my program. A few months back, we had a meeting where issues of language came up, and I have been thinking about these issues quite a lot as I work my way through the delivery portion of my thesis project.

The student whose committee I am on is a feminist who works in a very male-dominated organization in a very male-dominated field. Her commitment to this organization is life-long, and her challenge is to find ways to help that organization recognize and address the dehumanizing aspects of its current hierarchical structure. In order to help her learn to do this more effectively, she specifically chose outside advisors who are male and who have had good experiences with her organization or others like it. This has made for an interesting degree committee, to be certain.

One more piece of background: this graduate program is intentionally designed to give change practitioners a theory base that allows them to understand their work in the context of an entire system (or a system of related systems). This means that it is partly about language. The program knows that language is very powerful, and that the ways we name things matter a great deal.

Anyway, in this degree committee meeting, one of the straight white men on her committee suggested that the language of feminism is “divisive” and needs to be replaced with the “less divisive” language of the program. This is when the meeting began to run off the rails for me. The suggestion here is that what is described by the language of feminism is not worth seeing. Moreover, I heard this comment as suggesting that what the language of feminism sees and says is not acceptable content for discourse in an academic setting.

As a person who has spent the better part of 25 years trying to find and refine languages for describing the world I see, I was unhappy this man could suggest that dropping the language of feminism might not entail a loss, or that the loss might not be a meaningful one.

When I thought about it more, I realized that it’s hard to take seriously someone who holds all available privilege (straight, white, male, educated, financially secure, Christian, …) suggesting that language that calls out that privilege is divisive. In this case, “divisive” sounds like code for “threatening”.

I do not mean to imply that his suggestion was self-serving and disingenuous, at least not consciously. I know this man to be sincere in his belief that he is committed to full equality for all human beings, and yet he acted to silence conversation that was highlighting the ways in which the world currently falls short of that ideal.

It strikes me that this is how privilege works. Very few people consciously choose actions that create a privileged space for themselves, based on their skin color or gender; most of us are too fair-minded to act intentionally against other people. Instead, privilege sustains itself in covert ways, and this exchange about language is an example of one way in which this happens.

I found the suggestion that the student whose committee this is should give up language that allows her to claim what she sees so astonishing that I have made a note to myself to pay attention to times when I discount the language used by someone who lacks privilege I hold: if I can convince myself not to listen to someone who is using language that threatens my privilege, then my privilege can be preserved. That is, if I am privileged to set the terms of the discourse, I need to be particularly careful not to restrict the conversation to language that implicitly favors my worldview, unless I am trying to perpetuate my worldview at all costs.

For me, this is a huge lesson. I spent much of the last school year working on issues of culture and privilege with a year-long project team. One thing this work reminded me is that it is far easier to see privilege when I am on the down-side of a privilege differential than when I am in the privileged position. I am working on using my perspective as a person lacking privilege to help me understand how privilege works, and trying to understand what the lessons are for me person with privilege. In this case, it’s to pay attention to my own tendency to control the language of discourse, particularly when I am in the power position.

On women bloggers, op-ed writers, and Katha Pollitt

Until now, I haven't felt much like writing about the feeding frenzy going on in certain circles around the question of why there are not more women bloggers, which was begun when Kevin Drum asked the question to kick off the gazillionth cycle of what generally looks like a circle jerk to me. However, to Kevin's credit, this time around, he asked some guest bloggers (women) to comment on this issue on his very own blog. Katha Pollitt's piece inspires me to write this tonight.

First, kudos to Kevin for being at least a little more open-minded than some of the other A-list male political bloggers. Second, I am curious as to why the women he invited to write aren't actually bloggers, but are instead op-ed writers of various types. And third, I can't let this paragraph of Katha Pollitt's piece pass without a massive "Brava!" from the sidelines....

Sexism, which is what we are discussing here, often justifies itself by assuming that women don't want the thing that is being denied them. Before Title IX, which opened up high school and college athletics to women, the common wisdom was that girls didn't like sports — girls weren't competitive, they were weak (remember girls basketball?), they didn't like to get sweaty and dirty, they feared being hurt, they were always getting their periods. Once the opportunities were there — thanks to the women's movement, not to gym teachers promising to keep an eye out for talented female players — girls turned out in droves. Now we see girls even in quintessentially masculine sports like soccer and rugby. Today nobody says girls are shrinking violets on the playing field.

P.S. I remember girls' basketball -- a game in which we were forced by the rules to play an aggressively zoned game, with penalties assessed for stepping out of "our" zones. Phui.

Two reasons I love Pinko Feminist Hellcat

Both reasons are in the same post.

Read it and discover why it matters that today is (was) World Water Day. And also to see what happens when an excellent sense of humor runs up against an immovable object; and her point is no less accurate for its amusement value.

On girls, math, and a bunch of other stuff

I have two degrees in math. It wasn't exactly an heroic achievement, but it was harder for me than for my male colleagues, and not because I lacked aptitude, ability, or passion.

(Updated to add: Here's another blog entry I ran across today that reports an idiotic explanation for why women are less likely to end up in math and science. This? Is exactly what I am talking about. If you think that girls and women can't, or don't want to, pursue certain interests, it's easy to ignore the systemic ways in which they are discouraged from doing so.

(In fact, it strikes me that explaining away the fact that fewer girls pursue advanced math/science courses as resulting from something inherent in the girls is a way of avoiding having to look at one's own responsibility. After all, if the system is loaded against girls, and you are a man who benefitted from that, then you are implicated in that system. On the other hand, if it results from some "feature" of the girls, then you can continue to reap the benefits of playing with loaded dice without ever having to cop to it.)

Molly!!??!!

I am a huge fan of Molly Ivins. I agree with ninety percent of what she writes, which is an extremely high "hit rate" for me with any author, and I usually find her essays hysterically funny or very thought-provoking (and even, surprisingly often, both funny and thought-provoking). That's one reason I am struggling so much with this piece.

I find her discussion of the ways in which Texas lawmakers are trying to close loopholes in the laws that allow minors in what we might euphemistically call "difficult family situations" to get judicial exemption from the law that requires parental consent for an abortion to be heart-rending and painful to read. I literally cried when I was reading the litany of examples she gives in her piece. (If you didn't click on the link above and read the essay, you really should. Here's another link to it so you don't even have to move your mouse to the previous paragraph to do so.)

Then I read the whole thing again and realized that she has framed this righteously outraged (and outraging) discussion by dismissing people's outrage about Lawrence Summers and his remarks about the capabilities of women in science (and other academic pursuits). Now I want to get on an airplane and fly to Austin and go to the bar where I know Molly Ivins hangs out and scream at her. (I'm a little surprised by the vehemence of my reaction, actually.)

It's depressing that she doesn't understand how tightly tied these two issues are. Yes, the young, scared, pregnant, women of Texas need our support, and they need it now, not a year from now. What strikes me about the way in which she dismisses the importance of what's going on with Dr. Summers and his misogyny is that she's missing the inter-connectedness of it all. In a world in which women are treated as being fully capable agents in their own lives, and in which men in power would find it unthinkable to suggest that women just aren't as smart as men in certain ways, well, in that world, the notion that small-town county clerks who don't know how to execute the law, and small-town (male) judges should exercise control over the bodies of women in terrible situations simply would not arise.

I don't for one single second think that we should be outraged at and taking action in response to Summers' remarks instead of figuring out how to help desperate teenagers in horrifying circumstances. But I do believe that in a world in which women are viewed as fully competent to manage our own lives, and not treated as sexual adjuncts to the men who have the "real lives" and "real work", many fewer teenage girls would be in these horrific circumstances and it would be a lot easier to help those who were.

It's not a zero-sum game, and there is room for outrage both at specific instances and at evidence of systemic misogyny.

(Thanks to Mouse Words for pointing me at Molly Ivins' article a couple of days before I would have gotten to it on my usual reading schedule.)