Academia uses human language

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my gender studies classes, it’s that privilege, like Jesus or drone warfare, works in mysterious ways.

“Academia’s fascist discourse” – the headline of my colleague Alex Carlisle’s latest column – got me excited. I assumed the writer would be arguing that academia doesn’t make room for unconventional, supposedly non-academic discourses. Or maybe that U.S. state-school academia is bogged down in bureaucracy and harmful to an enriching education.

Instead, Carlisle accuses academia of being so afraid of offending different people that it’s intolerant of middle-class white hetero American males.

For starters, academia is not a monolithic institution of Marxists. Like, some of us are just communist free lovers.

Carlisle writes: “The sad thing is, these politically correct fascists have great influence in the society, especially on the youth who think they actually learn things in gender studies classes.”

Hey now, that’s a cheap shot.

Let’s get this queer: “academia” is not petrified of offending everyone. School administrators are. They’re afraid of lawsuits based on conservative ideas about political correctness.

The academia I enjoy loves to offend. It asks stark questions about how we live our lives. It asks me to check my privileges. It asks me to challenge my language, especially that which I use to refer to people. Not just so people’s feelings aren’t hurt, but because language changes how we think about and imagine people.

I can abide people who question the utility of changing language. It’s a question well worth examining.

What I can’t abide is privileged folks’ played-out circlejerk about how minoritized persons are bent on the destruction of every white Christian cisgender heterosexual capitalist. I’ll refer to this construct as “Romney” for short.

Not all minoritized persons hate Romneys. In this case, they want to make Romneys question the motivations behind, and consequences of, certain language. Romneys need to recognize that institutional language generically refers to non-Romney people, and that Romneys are the assumed subjects of “normal” language.

Romneys aren’t inherently evil. Romneys just don’t experience the daily, institutional and pervasive violences that non-Romneys do.

Language is one of those violences. Carlisle points out several useful examples.
“So, for instance, rather than use the word ‘chairman,’ students must use the word ‘chairperson.’ Rather than use the words ‘foreigner’ or ‘alien,’ students must use the terms ‘visitor from another country’ or ‘immigrant.’ Rather than ‘disabled person,’ use ‘person with a disability’ or ‘differently abled.’”

Chairman assumes that all people in charge are men, or that the default person is male.

Chairperson neutralizes a term that needs not be gender-specific.

When someone is called a foreigner or alien, they are assumed to not belong in their state of residence. They are dehumanized and criminalized.

Persons with disability better describes someone whose entire person is not defined by disability. Differently abled better establishes a continuum of ability (though I’ve noticed some unease with this term).

There’s a difference between political correctness and using humanizing language to refer to, well, humans. There’s a difference between humanizing language and fascist intolerance of people who are assumed to be normal.

It’s not an attack on normative people. It’s an attack on the language that partially polices and maintains this norm. It doesn’t take a gender studies major to notice some people don’t have as much power as others.

­— ptbeane@indiana.edu