FEMINIST PULSE
Language is purposeful. Every word has within it, the history, politics and cultural weightage of the region and its people. So when words cross borders, carried over by funding groups, academic and social media channels, it arrives as a sum total.
While the English language has been a great vehicle for transmitting feminist ideas, it also has a deeply disturbing side. Apart from the history of global colonisation that English carries that resulted in the establishment of the “Anglophone world”, the anglicisation of global human rights discourse is now serving as a basis for neoliberal and postmodern concepts. It is contributing to female oppression and the erasure of the material reality of sex.
While it claims to encourage diversity and inclusion by broadening identities and neutralising language, it is but a strategic imposition that rips the rest of the world from their own culture where English is not the language of use. A set of categories to suit global market trends and maintain colonial, patriarchal structures. From the rebranding of the exploitative system of prostitution to compelling NGOs to include pronouns in signatures, even in the countries where gendered pronouns do not exist in native languages, the colonisers are after female bodies once again.
The vocabulary of Anglo-American identity colonialism – from the terms gender identity and expression, nonbinary, genderqueer, menstruating people and persons giving birth, to the acronyms unbeknown to anyone like AFAB and FLINTA – is being imported into languages that didn’t create these concepts. It is expected to be applied by countries that didn’t get a chance to debate them, let alone have the grammatical or sociocultural hardware to hold them. And its ramifications on women – particularly migrant women and women from the global south – are dire.
Pronouns – the Rohypnol of Post-Colonial Era
Writing for Fair Play for Women, Barra Kerr makes incisive points that capitulation to pronouns is not the polite, trivial courtesy it is portrayed to be. Instead, it acts as Rohypnol (a medical drug) on the brain’s defences, dulling our instincts to respond to threats. Drawing from the Stroop psychological effect, she makes the point that if we force the mind to overrule what the eyes and ears perceive, it creates a cluster of confusion and cognitive fatigue. A burden/cost overwhelmingly borne by women who are terrorised to comply. This analytical argument in favour of women, ergo against gender identity activists was deleted by Medium, and it essentially illustrates how any form of dissent from colonial logic of compliance is handled: censorship over conversation.
Consider the controversial French pronoun (iel) that was modelled on they/them, and was added to the Petit Robert dictionary in 2021. The resistance was entirely dismissed in Anglophone media as ‘conservative backlash’ despite most of the vocal opposition coming from feminists. It is especially tragic because the feminists were still fighting to get professional feminine default phrases like une professeure, une autrice or une médecin among others more mainstream. An Anglophone import rendering sex irrelevant took precedence over decades-long campaigns to make women visible in French language.
Sheila Jeffreys in her 2014 book Gender Hurts wrote: “the idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.” Collapsing the category of sex into some arbitrary ‘self identification’ has heavy consequences on how our systems recognise and protect women – and such consequences are now at the mercy of the Anglosphere.
Dutch and German linguists have carried on discussions over whether priority should be given to female visibility through feminisation of titles, or neutralising sex altogether; or as they would like to say, making gender invisible. The Anglo identity terms have disrupted discussions on expanding female visibility, instead, they became a dog whistle for colonial gender identity imposition.
Latinx and Other Colonial Absurdities
Coined in the US academic ‘queer’ circles, and statistically the best documented example of linguistic colonial imposition is ‘Latinx’. Allegedly to neutralise the Spanish Latina, and Latino – a language where nouns are grammatically sexed – and to serve as an ‘inclusive’ solution, this absurdly coined colonial term even found its place in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. This term was heavily pushed across media, universities, NGOs, and almost all self-proclaimed progressive institutions including government bodies. But what was hyped up to be one of the most progressive endeavours turned out was almost entirely dismissed by the very community. According to Pew Research, 75% of Latino population who’re familiar with the word say it should not be used to describe them, and this is up by 10% when in 2019 it was 65% who opposed it. These numbers indicate an entire community overwhelmingly saying no to a label invented for them by a group of people who don’t even speak their language. Could it get any more colonial than this? Perhaps the only other word that could make it worse is the word ‘womxn’ that even as an English word makes no sense.
‘Sex Work’ – Terms Trivialising Women’s Abuse
To sanitise the violent crimes by men on women, the term ‘sex work’ originated in the Anglophone activist circles in the 70s/80s as an alternative to prostitution. The goal was to reframe commercial sexual abuse as a form of labour to decriminalise it. While it is a specific political position limited to some circles, it now circulates globally via several development funds, WHO guidance, NGO frameworks and the UN policies as a default ‘neutral’ terminology.
When the term infiltrates languages like Bengali or Vietnamese, through international aid, the damages are more than just linguistic. It pre-solves a political debate on whether prostitution is ‘work’ or acute exploitation before such a debate has even risen in the receiving country. Such imposition also mandates itself over the condition of funding. NGOs are expected to use specific terms should they be considered for aid; and this leaves poorer countries out of options than to adopt Anglophone words. Survivors of this industry could try their might to speak out about their own horrible experience – who name it for what it is – but their words fall in the ears of institutions that have already concluded it is wrong.
This imposition also pressures local activists, feminists and civil society organisations to speak in a particular Anglo dialect to be relevant in media, and to survive institutionally, even if such words barely reflect the reality of their states/country. Anglicising also removes all analysis rooted in several non-western structures like caste, and prevents specific attention to be given to certain communities on an urgent basis. In all these chaotic assertions, the reverse is never true. Concepts or words that have no direct equivalent in English fall short of being exported out of home countries. For example, there is no specific word to mean ‘karpu’ which in Tamil means a combination of chastity, honour, purity that feminists have to scramble to make sense in English. Though these words carry immense political weight, the women have to negotiate somehow with limited acceptable terminologies.
The audacity of western countries to dismiss some analysis for lacking an easy English equivalent costs women, especially in the global south. Because we are forced to work with English categories, arguing with broad English assumptions. The latest wave of supposed progressive gender politics is a true testament to the oldest colonial models – arriving with a vocabulary, claiming/declaring it to be universal, and dismiss every resistance as backward.
The Migrant Women Caught in the Maze
Imagine escaping war, famine, terrorism, acute poverty, all of it, and arriving at a country you hope would provide a semblance of safety, these concepts would no longer seem abstract. Sitting across from a Dutch welfare staff, a Scottish domestic violence centre, a German hospital, having to explain the hardships in a language she’s got to learn, is not easy as it is. It makes matters worse when she has to use colonial terminology that she may have never encountered before.
A review of language barriers while offering primary care across fourteen European countries concluded that it included a lack of interpreters, limited cultural understanding, risks to women’s bodies/ health due to language barriers. While navigating the categories provided by host country’s language, especially while explaining personal experiences on sexual assault, domestic violence, if the right words don’t map to exact categories, it jeopardises the care she would need. If the given category is ‘sex work’ and her experience has a mismatch, it is not a mere linguistic challenge, it determines the protection she receives and her life thereafter.
In the end, all this language distortion converges on migrant women as a whole. She must learn the host country’s language as quickly as possible, navigate bureaucratic categories that she’d never heard of before, successfully translate her experience into a framework formulated elsewhere by people whose lives are so profoundly different from her own. This is also in a system where the very word woman is contested and access to female-only spaces is considered ‘bigotry’. Where the harm meted out on her could be easily reclassified as her chosen vocation, and the vocabulary of her mother tongue doesn’t even have a translation for it.
Words Have Meaning, Words Have Power
Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence said: “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
Radical feminism has always insisted that naming is power – that women’s liberation requires women to be able to name their experience. Those who control language, in turn control perceptions, and thus codify a retrofitted reality. What we are presented with in the modern times does the opposite – it removes the ability of women to be able to name their experiences, imposing words that they believe is right, on to a group that did not ask for them.
The words we use determine who gets to control, and who is being controlled. Similarly who gets protected, who is believed, and of course, who gets erased.