Weekly Response #1 -- by Holly Richard

During a year teaching in a middle school, I exhausted myself trying to expand my students’ vocabulary for the sole purpose that they then could have more appropriate words to express their feelings and opinions. The sixth graders, in particular, had a few favorite words that could describe anything and everything; “gay” was one term that could describe anything/one that they detested at the same time as describing something/one who amused them.

I was an art teacher, which at the middle school level equated making messes and then cleaning them up. Nevertheless, we observed and discussed artwork from professional artists, from the past to present, from our village to abroad. The word “gay,” again, was a common response when I asked students what they thought about a piece that they didn’t care for. “What exactly about this artwork makes is gay?” I would usually add, “Perhaps you could be more specific in your opinion.”

Because of my mission that year and my lover-of-language background, Jacinth Samuels’ discussion of “queer” and “nigger” in “Dangerous Liaisons: Queer Subjectivity, Liberalism and Race” resonated in me. My students would ask what harm does using the term “gay” inflict on anyone? But there were other words as well, as our American culture rehearses many derogatory terms in private and public spheres. “Cunt” was a term that came up in class one day. A student said she heard it in the music she listened to and she’d been called on lots of times, but she didn’t know what it meant or where it came from. Furthermore, she had been called “cunt” when someone was mad at her and another time when she was with friends having fun. Inga Muscio’s book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence addressed this term and encouraged women to reappropriate “cunt.” Quite similar to Samuels’ discussion of how the term “nigger” is used within black cultures, “cunt” can be used in various ways among those who have one. Yet, when a man uses the word “cunt,” it most often signifies rejection, objectification, and describes a collective female inferiority, OR it ascribes feminine qualities – meaning negative and inferior, to a man (the terms “pussy,” “Sally,” “girl,” etc. do the same).

We have a generation of young people growing up practicing sexist, racist, narrow-minded language that many of their parents were trying to discontinue. How can we shift the use of certain terms in our cultural mainstream to be used in positive ways rather then the opposite? To celebrate difference, but not only out of intolerance? How can any epithet that has historically defined in opposition to the “normal” (read heterosexual, male, white, republican, etc. – perhaps this is a reflection of my own prejudices) and, as Samuels states, “thereby identif[ied] normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence” be redefined?