Where does all this weird language come from?

[speakingwoman]

Hi, just wondering if someone can help me trace the history of the terms that we hear in modern discourse around trans issues. I had assumed that "erasure" and being "erased" were very modern terms but just saw "erased" used in "An Angel at My Table" so it's not as old as I thought. Also the concepts of "violence", "literal violence" and "identity" which sound absurd but seem fraught with meaning.

Also if someone can help me understand the history of this modern tendency within Universities to shut down wrongful thinking/speech. My suspicion is that people saw Germany's successful banning of Nazi propoganda post-war and wanted to use the same techniques for slightly less apocalyptic issues and have been figuring out ways to do this ever since.

The reason for asking is that I'm pondering whether it's best to avoid the modern language altogether. The most effective techniques seem to involve much more old-fashioned down-to-earth language (I'm thinking of JustineMumsnet on the radio).

I also have this suspicion that if we adopt what I call "erasure" language we're playing on the other side's pitch.

I'm not trying to police other people's language. I'm just wondering whether I should be trying to understand and use these terms or whether it's better to see where they came from and reject them (in the way I know how to do with, for instance, certain jargon in education circles).

The rule for me on jargon is that it either helps or hinders.

As a scientist, apparently you learn as many new words as someone studying a new language, and scientific and medical jargon (used correctly) IS useful. It’s useful because it has exact, precise meanings and it can be used to shorten complex ideas. Basically it’s ‘good’ jargon because it’s like shorthand, for specific concepts that everyone agrees on.

Bad jargon is all this POMO crap. Literal violence for example. Bad jargon twists meaning, it doesn’t cement it.

I’ll let other people more qualified than I talk about where it’s come from, but for me it’s part of this process of dumbing down I see everywhere. The rise of 24 hour and fake news plus the internet has driven a change from experts fact checking and speaking carefully to everyone yelling at each other, no fact checking and people’s opinions being seen as just as valid as expert opinions.

Now that’s ok on some issues where people need a voice, but it’s fucking disastrous in other areas. When you get on a plane, you let the pilot drive.

The dumbing down and manipulation of language and the suppression of debate creates a generation where people CANNOT debate. We see this - you debate, you ask a question, they scream back at you that you’re a bigot, because they can’t argue. They have no skill to argue.

How malleable are such a generation? How can they take on truly scary powerful regimes? How can they stand up for themselves against real oppression when they cannot argue?

They will find they can’t. That’s pretty bloody scary.

Dammit, I typed out a whole brain fart about jargon and Bowl said it better.

Jargon implies the user has acquired a discipline, and depth of knowledge.
Bad jargon is used to give that impression without the process or benefits of self discipline.

cheers babel. mindbogglingly useful.

I like your basic idea of useful versus non useful jargon.

A sensible person also pointed out to me that terms have a life-cycle. They tend to have an initial period of usefulness (dislodge what was there before) but then get past their sell-by-date.

I like that crow.

I like that too crow much more succinct than mine :)

And true, so I can express what I’m doing to another scientist, regardless of their native language, pretty fast. To explain in in my native language to a layperson takes longer and is much harder to do (although it’s doable, for sure.) but I can only do that because the words have meaning.

Erasure as a philosophical device comes from Heidegger, expanded by Derrida.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_rature

I’m not sure who coined the term ‘Pomo* addled’ (I first saw it here) but as a working class gal who stumbled into a critical theory degree, I find it a wonderfully apt descriptor

This essay (from the Tate magazine ages ago) is interesting to me, in relation to our current real-world situation.
Perhaps some of the narcisstic rage comes from knowing you can’t perform ‘woman’ well enough to actually erase women?

www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/revelation-erasure

(Screenshot extracts)

God I love mumsnet. It's like a fucking symposium only with useful information about breastfeeding and clingfilm thrown in.
Or vice versa.

thanks!

while we're at it, what about "microaggression"

I bet that's not Heidegger. Or is it? Montaigne maybe?

so I just looked up pomo...

that's not it, is it?

Pomo
ˈpəʊməʊ/
noun
noun: Pomo; plural noun: Pomo; plural noun: Pomos

1.
a member of an American Indian people of northern California.
2.
any of the languages of the Pomo.

adjective
adjective: Pomo

1.
relating to the Pomo or their languages.

I agree that it is all about creating the impression of education, validiity, faux-intellectualism, narcissism and grandiosity, even, and also making a niche, a club, an inner circle of those in the know. Its all about performance and show and style over substance. And to get retweets...

As an experiment and to keep in touch with what on earth is going on in this country, I watched an episode of Hollyoaks the other night and was just at the style of language - the pseudo psychological speeches about journeys and feelings and over emotionally wrought exaggerated nonsense, delivered by hammy actors and characters that look about 14. Its no real honest plain talk about raw honest feelings, its just weird language that I am sure none of them really understand. They would have had a better grasp of Shakespeare I think.

I also thought similarly when I read a CV thread the other day and the replies were full of bizarre gobblydy gook language and jargon bingo that it made me feel quite ill at the thought that this might be actually be the standard these days.

I do think plain speech and not too many acronyms is important when debating so we don't alienate peole who don't keep up with all the new internet terms (it can be so excluding!!!) and so those who only use jargon and wild emotion, are shown up for being exactly what they are.

One I learned recently was "counterdemo". It was used to describe a group of violent activists deliberately seeking out and chanting at a small, quiet group of women standing at Speaker's Corner, minding their own business.

I still don't know what pomo means!

can't use manopedia any more (need to start writing for them but where's the fun in that?)

SpeakingWoman

Pomo means post-modernist/ism

pomo

"A person who is self-consciously postmodern in his attitude and appearence."

Oops, sorry!

I meant to add a footnote, hence the * after pomo!

Short for ‘post-modernism’ and satisfyingly similar (especially in small text, without my reading glasses) to ‘porno’

Microaggression seems have been coined by a US psychiatrist, Chester Pierce, in the 1970s: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression\

Identity (or ‘cultural identity’) seems to have references all over the shop - en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_identity

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_theory

I suspect I probably learned about it through semiotics - en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

and Derrida’s work in this area (signifiers and signified not being fixed) seems to dovetail pretty neatly with some of the TRA shifting sands we are all so familiar with!

‘Literal violence’ could just be the common hyperbolic use of ‘literally’ to make an exaggerated point, although if you wanted to go super high brow it could be a reference to Shakespear’s Titus Andronicus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia (Lavinia is raped offstage, so the ‘literal violence’ is unseen by the audience. The rape is carried out by two brothers on the command of their mother and they amputate her hands and tongue so she cannot tell her own story, instead she uses a story from Ovid’s ‘Metamorpheses’ to communicate what happened).

I believe I just pulled that Lavinia reference out of my ass ^ which pretty much illustrates what this kind of education teaches a person to do - the way to defeat it, I believe, is to channel my nana and point out how silly it all is and how irrelevant most of it is to the lived experience/material fact.

It's all just smoke and mirrors, rather like terms like 'friendly fire', 'collateral damage'. A way to obsfucate, confuse and intimidate.

I can see there is a need though to go beyond 18th century enlightenment discourse though......

Otherwise you’d have no way to challenge men speaking for women, whites speaking for blacks etc.

Jargon used between two people (or organisations) in the same field of knowledge is a useful shorthand.

Jargon as used by TRAs to non TRAs is simply a tool of exclusion and a cover for pretending they know more than you when their ability to construct a cogent argument is woefully inadequate and cannot be backed up by scientific data or any genuine evidence base.

So much of transactivist language is the language of mental illhealth.

Words/ theories used to describe MH disorders are appropriated and projected onto others by people who have been through threapy or read about it (god damn internet, self help books and lack of proper therapy) but who did not 'get it' and misunderstand and misuse the terms. People misdiagnose themselves and try to normalise what is abnormal. A manipulative survival strategy against shame and self anihilation,'being bad', not good enough or powerless. Some act inwardly, some act out.

Literal violence - because normal words are not enough to communicate the intensity of their feelings and desire to get rid of them. Hyperbole but as a symptom of emotional dysregulation and intense mental pain/ frustration that can bearly be borne, not from being creative or excitable. Not pomo.

Language like menstruators, the body rather than my body, separate from the self, is all language of dissociation, denial, othering of the self, escape from shame/ horror/ thoughts. We have the word othering in genreal use now, but allow some trans people to project by othering us when actually they are trying desperately to other themsleves.

Then you do get the 'pomo' (whatever is actually meant by that) cool woke super liberal people who thinks every thing is new and they have made brand new discoveries, but have no real clue about the depth of anything and they naively enable such language and behaviour to become mainstream without understanding where it comes from. Collusion by being dim, a sprinkling of unrigorous education and a touch of narcissim from too much social media.

Nazism must be too long ago now for the younger genreation to really learn from it.

I blame the poor state of state education. None of the people I went to school with but into this shit. I would assume that is because we all learned how to speak a D how to think.

I first came across Pomo ideas in Christian circles. It frustrated the ever living wotsits out me because of the insistence of there being no absolutes, everything in a permanent state of doubt, and everyone having their own truth.
These things are irritants; useful for philosophical debates and general theological 'angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin' questions perhaps, but designed exclusively to defer any actual definitive answers. That's a horrible way to live, emotionally speaking.

To see this pomposity in a religious setting is one thing - to see it in the realm of the physical, when it pertains to actual safety and rights issues is jawdroppingly ridiculous.

That a great link, Betty, thanks! RE seafret's point, it's specifically the language of dissociation. Which is sometimes necessary as a method of self-protection but in this movement is positively celebrated, often in rather disturbing ways.

Dale Spender wrote a couple books that you might like.
"Man Made Language" and "Women of Ideas, and what men have done to them".

great posts. I had not realised about the mental health vocabulary but it makes so much sense.