Absolutely true. And I don't think purging the language will have any effect on the major social issues for women or anyone else. Nonetheless, it's simply good manners to be aware of language that, in a given setting, can offend. Even--maybe especially--if it doesn't seem offensive to, say, me.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Rupert Mallin <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Oct 12, 2014 6:16 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: What would Shakespeare say?
>
>With the turmoil over language on this List, I recall a correspondence with
>professor Pauline Kiernan, whose "Filthy Shakespeare" I tried to take into a
>YOI - a youth prison for young men. Every word Shakespeare wrote had that
>other edge - often an opposite meaning. I remember two things: Shakespeare's
>sonnets were among the first of highlighted writers to disconnect "love"
>from "ownership" and at the same time he was writing women's roles
>undertaken by male youths. Imagine the ridiculous and wonderful turmoil
>Shakespeare was in: writing for the court, the rising artisans and for those
>of us below the thrust stage. Public hangings, brothels, sewage in the
>streets - Shakespeare rose above and beside this to create incredible
>universal dilemmas for all of us to ponder.
>
>I know there will be a Revolution. I'm entirely sure it will be led and
>championed by women - working class women, probably among the masses in
>China.
>
>As a union activist, as a bloke who works with many women, I'm taken aback
>by recent sensibilities over 'language' when wages for women in Britain have
>gone backwards to 1870s levels, according to the TUC. I am swearing
>constantly - but nowhere at the level of women in teaching, the NHS. Tescos
>or social services.
>
>I have championed LGBT rights and am wholly understanding of issues around
>trans-gender rights every-which-way. The language sensibilities on this
>List does not relate to the world out there. It relates only to a small left
>field academic pursuit - intersectionality. Steer clear unless you want a
>Shakespeare free world. IT has sideways come out of the Occupy Movement et
>al. Oppressed groups are separated - the struggles for women's liberation
>are for them alone to understand, unless their oppression "intersects" with
>another oppressed group. This, apparently, is the "new feminism" for some in
>our UK universities. And if we break up into groups - men, women, children,
>blacks, gays, trans-gender, disabled - all is about the nuances of language
>to defend and define.
>
>Gone the universal, gone any notion of fighting together, gone the
>contradictions that language must be central to. This academic middle class
>agenda, in my view, has to be opposed for the greater prize of a "filthy"
>language of our times.
>
>Rupert Mallin
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