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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