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Well, that's an interesting one about identity - you identify as gay, and as such claim a separate relationship to the terminology from somebody using them who did not identify as gay. On the other hand, somebody might also claim membership of a group in order to confuse reactions to their use of the terminologies.
That's one problem with this concept. Another we have already seen. Duncan's started this thread by listing, unconcealed, lots of words that he feels have no part to play on Barbelith because they are so offensive, the assumption being that he need not worry about using them because in the hands of somebody so committed to self-identifying as non-racist/sexist/etc, they could not possibly cause offence. I think there's a tension there about revelation and declamation, and I'm concerned that the people who might find themselves on the receiving end of these terms are going to be made uncomfortable by having to wander through a bunch of terms which are offensive to them at the top of the page, listed by a straight white guy who has made the call that the important thing here is clarity of expression - we're back in "but I'm on your side/descriptive diminutive" territory here - in fact, the link to Clawfinger above is making me feel like it's 2002 all over again. To quote Persephone:
What this is making me think is, there's a luxury in being able to bat these words around in a debate. When they cannot be applied to you. Whereas I can't seem to help feeling batted around myself... This is what I was trying to get at --that this thread, in a sense, is an instance of privilege.
This creates an irreducible paradox, in a way, and possibly the only way to get round it is to have people coming forward and saying that these are the words that, used on Barbelith with whatever intention, are personally offensive to them - that is, in a context in which they retain control of the words and their usage. So, for example, sfd primarily complained about the use of the word "cunt" because, as a woman, she felt that having a beautiful and powerful word describing ladybits used to mean "absolute fucker" was offensive to her. Others instead drew the line at the word being used as a term of metonymic abuse when applied specifically to women - broader discussion here. As kovacs says, one muight expect people on Barbelith already to understand the implications of their terminology, but I don't know if one can rely on that - for example, Duncan above sees "whore" when applied descriptively to a prostitute is acceptable, whereas presumably when applied to somebody who is not a prostitute it is unacceptable, which seems to me rather odd. At the next level, one could ask moderators to take responsibility for keeping an eye on and removing/confronting offensive terms, but that does have the downside that it relies on moderators having clear and reasonably coherent ideas of what constitutes offensive language, which they pretty clearly don't have (especially given that recently moderator status has been accessible largely by asking for it). So, we're back to Ts and Cs, and personally I'd like not to have a specific list in there, because it tends to lead to rules lawyering... |
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