But where is the boundary between education and evangelism here? It's always a bit of a grey area, isn't it? Would you challenge someone who referred to a corner shop as a 'Paki shop'? That usage was fairly common in my childhood, but would surprise me now, and I'd challenge it and expect most of my liberal-minded friends (you included) would do likewise.
It seems to me that challenging gendered language (which is sometimes unconscious sexism) is much more like challenging racism than like an academic discipline foisting its thought patterns on unwilling passersby.
As far as I'm concerned the meaning of words drifts over time and is defined by usage. I agree (at least to the extent that I can, since something I do is edit others' writing, which requires some pretence at 'correct English').
Instead, I am making an empirical observation concerning usage of the term and what it appears to mean. And what I'm doing is not saying "this is what feminism should mean", but saying that my empirical observations are that there are lots of people who choose to use the word to define themselves, and IME they all seem to broadly agree on the two propositions I stated above (although of course they all disagree on the details of what to do about it).
There are also lots of people who say "other people use it to mean <some other stuff>", but my point is that there are hardly any actual people saying "it means <some other stuff>", just people quoting those people. IYSWIM. So I try to challenge people who say "other people use it to mean <some other stuff>", especially when it turns out they think I'm one of those people!
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Date: Monday, 8 October 2007 01:51 pm (UTC)It's always a bit of a grey area, isn't it? Would you challenge someone who referred to a corner shop as a 'Paki shop'? That usage was fairly common in my childhood, but would surprise me now, and I'd challenge it and expect most of my liberal-minded friends (you included) would do likewise.
It seems to me that challenging gendered language (which is sometimes unconscious sexism) is much more like challenging racism than like an academic discipline foisting its thought patterns on unwilling passersby.
As far as I'm concerned the meaning of words drifts over time and is defined by usage.
I agree (at least to the extent that I can, since something I do is edit others' writing, which requires some pretence at 'correct English').
Instead, I am making an empirical observation concerning usage of the term and what it appears to mean.
And what I'm doing is not saying "this is what feminism should mean", but saying that my empirical observations are that there are lots of people who choose to use the word to define themselves, and IME they all seem to broadly agree on the two propositions I stated above (although of course they all disagree on the details of what to do about it).
There are also lots of people who say "other people use it to mean <some other stuff>", but my point is that there are hardly any actual people saying "it means <some other stuff>", just people quoting those people. IYSWIM. So I try to challenge people who say "other people use it to mean <some other stuff>", especially when it turns out they think I'm one of those people!