Language and Speech Patterns

I’ve been reading all the posts regarding the newest (okay, given LJ’s deletion of of fan artist accounts, second newest) thing going around LJ. Yes, you guessed it, the miscegenation debate. And what’s really shocking to me is not that a) very educated people don’t know the term and its racist origins or b) people don’t see anything wrong with using this term, even knowing its origins but c) apparently it’s a bad thing to call people on their racist/sexist/classist/intellectualist/etc shit.

When I went to ’s journal to link up her original post, it blew me away that she has five posts following it, all of the effect of essentially disclaiming her statements to simply get people to concentrate on the real topic at hand: the racist usage of a derogatory term.

This is not uncommon in fandom. This is not uncommon even in academia (though with different root sources, at least in my portion of academia). It frightens the hell out of me. We, women especially, are patterned and trained to use disclamatory language. “I think,” “to an extent,” “it seems,” “you know?,” all of these are disclamatory tags that pepper our language and speech. Generally speaking, men are allowed to state, but women are forced to explain. I think that idea of intersectional language is made even more difficult when you bring in other traditionally oppressed statuses, such as race or disability or class.

In academia, at least social sciences where I primarily read, I think disclamatory language is a huge problem. In essence, the dry, dispassionate, “value-free” expectation of scientific research encourages it by (falsely) removing the scientist’s goals and standpoint’s from the equation. Science is not “value-free” because scientists are not value-free. Even worse, this kind of scientific inquiry privileges the advantaged perspective. In essence, research questions tend to explore the deficiencies of the groups in disadvantaged social positions than they are to explore the deficiencies of groups with social power. So we ask, “why do women have so little self-confidence?” rather than “why do men have so little modesty?” Posing questions this way, researching this way, implies that “those with power are normal; their traits, behaviors, and social position require no justification” (Sprague 2005: 11). There’s a lot of writing on feminist methodology in research in social sciences right now that’s fascinating. (Of course, I was a standpoint theorist from long ago, back when it was called “new historicism” in literary theory, to display my personal bias in research.)

In fandom, disclaimatory language seems almost worse. (See, I did it there myself. It’s ubiquitious!) Those female language patterns are reinforced over and over by the other members of fandom itself. Case in point: ’s inability to simply just say “this is a racist term” without people pressing her and reacting and forcing her to qualify, qualify, qualify. When you don’t disclaim your “opinion,” (never mind that you might actually be stating something that is a fact), you’re seen as aggressive and unreasonable because of it. You almost have to have the ability to waffle and compromise and use weasel words to have a real discussion in fandom and half the time those discussions end up hijacked by “oh, but her tone!” criticisms anyway.

I don’t have any particular revelations on why fandom in particular is so focused on making people disclaim. Part of it may be that online fandom, especially fic/art producing fandom, is so much a female space and female groups are traditionally cooperative acts (and there’s a whole bunch of potential studies in why and how fandom members take a competitive social act and try and reshape it to a cooperative one, with varying degrees of success, research for the future!). Quilting circles, for example, to use a somewhat out of date one (though my grandmother’s quilting circle is awesome). There’s also the Cult of Nice, from the Cult of Self-Esteem that says any criticism, valid or otherwise, is scorned as bad and if you can’t say something nice, either shut up or lie about it. Maybe even some of it comes down to the idea of fandom as a “safe space.” There’s a lot of people out there who come to fandom strictly for fun and don’t want those icky political discussions messing it up. The ignorance defense is valid here too, in some ways, I think. (Look! More weasel words!) Fandom is primarily middle-to-upper class, educated white females and the priviledged class likes to protect its privilege. Willful blindness, you could say.

I really don’t know the reason. In actuality, it’s probably a combination of all those reasons and maybe even others. I just know that I personally would like to see less qualifications and more statements.

Sprauge, Joey. 2005. Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences. Walnut Creek: Rowman and Littlefield.