Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (with a bit of Cixous)

Due to the focus of this blog away from gender identity, this is going to be a difficult post to write. I’m probably not going to say anything edgy or controversial, but it’s hard to know how to word it without impinging on the subject. Nonetheless. . .

I had a dream, and no it was not like the one Martin Luther King had. I’ll slightly fictionalise it, but I find memories of dreams to be very flexible, as if they’re still forming when one awakes. In this dream, I’m back at Warwick University and Christine Battersby says that in order to stay on course for an MA, we all have to write an essay on Julia Kristeva. We have an hour to do it. This is in a way very much like the dream where you find yourself back at school having to do your exams and aren’t ready, but there’s a twist. When I look at the paper I’m planning to write on, all of it has stuff printed on it and with fifteen minutes to spare, I go back to my room to get clean, plain paper. On getting outside, I’m in Bristol. I can literally write anything at all on Julia Kristeva and get through, but even that seems to be beyond me in the dream.

OK, so hearing about other people’s dreams is boring isn’t it? For most people anyway. That said, it’s worth dwelling on this one to some extent and here comes the tightrope walk. There used to be a book with a mirror cover called ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’. It was about assertiveness and I didn’t buy or read it because at the time I definitely didn’t regard myself as a woman in my own right and felt that were I to become assertive it would be at the cost of actual women. I think I was fourteen at the time. There’s a long tale here about whether being assertive or successful occupies someone else’s space which I won’t go into here, but this was the beginning of a general approach towards feminist theory which I continued to pursue well into adulthood. Whether or not it made sense, I still had that attitude when I was doing postgrad at Warwick, that feminist theory was for women to read, not men, and that for a person constructed as male to do so was transgressive, invasive and violating, as well as effectively stealing women’s intellectual work, and that I wouldn’t understand it anyway because my mind was inferior to that of a woman’s due to emotional imbalance and male-socialised fake rationality. Consequently, I had some difficulty when I started my MA because, being in continental philosophy at Warwick, there was a big overlap with the Women’s Studies department. Most of my interaction with the staff there was with Gillian Rose and Christine Battersby. Gillian very sadly died of cancer in 1995, although the view was expressed that people took her work more seriously than it deserved to be because of her illness. I can’t comment because I know nothing. I heard something from her and knew a little of her. I was aware that she wanted to promote women’s work in philosophy, so I ignored her so as not to interfere. Christine Battersby is different. She’s chiefly known for her ‘Gender And Genius’, which analyses the concept of genius in the Romantic tradition and the appropriation of emotion from a feminine to a masculine trait. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I’m guessing there.

And this is the thing: I’ve never read it, whatever “it” is, in this setting. I was aware of Kristeva and Irigaray, but clearly I’m focussed on the former in this dream, and I am kind of honouring this dream by now writing about Kristeva here, and I’ll go on to write about Irigaray: semiotic and post-structuralist thinkers in the French mode.

Both of them were followers of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although I’m no fan of his, simply because they used to be his acolytes, it doesn’t follow that they either slavishly followed his sexist assumptions or built on them, and it’s possible to salvage positive things from an unpromising start. Sometimes, also, you presumably have to make compromises to get where you aim to be in your career. Anyway, Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French polymath working in the area of critical theory, and when I say she’s a polymath I mean she applies her thought to a number of disciplines. She sees them through the same lens. Two important concepts of hers are abjection and the chora, although there are others such as the symbolic vs the semiotic and intertextuality. At this stage, all I have is a dream I experienced a few days ago and a peremptory examination of her work, but I can plonk these two in front of you. Abjection is the idea of what emerges from one which is therefore intermediate between subjective and objective. A really obvious example is excrement, but an interesting observation can be made on another form of the abject. Speaking for myself, if I had a glass of water in front of me I was about to drink and I spat in it, I’d no longer want to drink it. This is of course apparently absurd, as that saliva would have immediately mixed with the water when it was in my mouth. Likewise, what one does in the toilet is expel matter which is already in one’s body, yet most of the time this is not dwelt upon. Probably most people, when asked to reflect on this, would say it’s an instinctive response which protects one against possible danger such as infection or poisoning, but Kristeva’s view is that it’s a psychoanalytical phenomenon which is extended to others, and in fact to the Other, which has a significance beyond instinctive survival. I can get on board with this to some extent because I can see that much of the time we don’t eat to keep ourselves alive, don’t play ball games to practice hunting skills and so on: function and purpose are in different realms, so that’s okay. There’s an important principle here actually, that evolution is effectively blind and produces whatever is good enough from the resources available.

Though somewhat elaborate-seeming, the abject is similar to the disgusting and the abhorrent. Kristeva uses it, as do others, in the analysis of horror and film critics have applied this to horror films. This also blends into the “monstrous feminine”, not so far as I know a specific concept of hers but overtly developed from this concept. In ‘Alien’, for example, the alien lays eggs in humans and hatches out in the abdomen before tearing out of it. The ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’ is about a mother alien killing human miners, and it even applies to ‘Beowulf’. The claim goes further than that to propose that all horror is in fact about the monstrous feminine. I have to say that that seems quite far-fetched but I haven’t read the arguments, which is a general problem with what I’m writing today. I haven’t read her at all.

Abjection is extended to refer to the Other, i.e. those who are “not we”, which often includes other humans whose differences, and even similarities, to oneself, are emphasised. Hence for a White able-bodied heterosexual man that could be women, non-Whites, the disabled and queers, or a combination of those. It could also work the other way but this is seldom done, or at least not enough. The situation is complex because as well as othering the people concerned, one also recognises, and possibly fears, oneself in them. This is clearly similar to the anthropological idea that things which don’t fit neatly into single categories are deemed disgusting, the classic example being a flying squirrel since in terms of the culture concerned it was neither beast nor bird – I don’t know what they thought of bats.

The other big concept is the chora, from the Greek and adopted from Plato’s idea of the inaccessible origin of creation, including the uterus as well as the primal chaos of the abyss from which the cosmos came forth. Kristeva tried to reclaim this concept from its patriarchal setting as Plato conceived it. For her, it’s a nourishing maternal space. It can also be thought of as early infancy, before the Mirror Stage, a significant event in Lacanian psychoanalysis where children first recognise themselves in mirrors. Before that point, the mother’s body is the sole mediator between the chora and the symbolic realm: she’s everything to the chora. Hence another distinction in Kristeva’s thought between the semiotic and the symbolic. The former is not to be confused with semiotics. Instead, it’s emotional and non-linguistic, involving rhythms, music and the poetic. This continues after entering the symbolic phase but is kind of hidden in crevasses. To me, that’s also fine but with both the chora and the semiotic it’s a major assumption, given the importance mothers have for their children, that they would be the sole progenitor of their children much of the time. This to me comes across as a model of development frozen in the past. This is often an issue with psychoanalysis: it feels like it’s frozen in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Even so, to some extent this is still valid and it’s certainly germane to the wider human world even today.

I can’t spend too long on Kristeva, but I will say a couple of other things about her. She was also a novelist, writing detective stories which were linked to her theory, with a journalist character representing her called Stephanie Delacour. I haven’t read them of course. The other thing was that she may have worked as a secret agent for the Bulgarian government and her early writing was published in Maoist journals. I don’t know how much evidence there is for that allegation and I’m just passing it on. It’s quite odd though because she seems quite conservative politically to me.

Now for Luce Irigaray, who wasn’t in my dream. She didn’t explicitly respond to Kristeva although some of her work is clearly a response to hers. The first thing I think of with Irigaray is that when my ex and Sarada were discussing her in a pub once, having read some of her work, they were interrupted by men who seemed to be threatened by the idea of two women talking about something intellectual. I don’t know if they’d noticed it was feminist theory. I wasn’t there, but clearly it was something important to the two of them around the time Sarada and I got together. I don’t know where my ex stands with her now, but Sarada can’t remember much. I could ask my ex I suppose.

Irigaray is a difference feminist. That is, she doesn’t believe women and men are the same and they’re both men, but that women have the potential for their own subjectivity which is inadequately explored, equal to men’s subjectivity and also different. She views Western society as inherently unethical because of the patriarchy. Regarding sexuality, I find her views are really rather strange. She says male sexual satisfaction can only be achieved via an instrument, by which I presume she means the phallus, whereas females are constantly auto-erotic because they are constantly touching themselves, by which she means that the labia are in contact with each other. This enables her to view penis in vagina sex as an interruption of this contact, so I presume that’s where she’s going with that. But the whole thing seems highly metaphorical. Clearly the human body regardless of sex is constantly in contact with itself, and this may be affirming but it doesn’t feel like much can be built on it. It seems to me that if one confines oneself to the metaphorical and poetic, as Irigaray seems to do, it changes philosophy’s role, or perhaps reveals a different role which seems unproductive, which is maybe what she was already either trying to do or already existed in continental philosophy. After all, philosophy is seen by some as literature. But to illustrate what I mean, in the analytical tradition philosophy is used to inform ethical debates, analyse politics and to design digital electronics. All these are thoroughly practical uses, although it’s easy to see the last as fairly irrelevant to social progress. If philosophy is to be replaced by a more metaphorical approach, either it has another function or it needs to proceed in a very unfamiliar way, perhaps in the way literature does, and of course I don’t know what that is but to me it may not be progress because of the peculiar phenomenon of universalism. If we have the ability to appreciate works written in Greek, Roman or Mediaeval settings, that common connection is positive but it also seems to mean it can’t touch social justice or provide a means of improving things, and I would expect a feminist philosopher to want progress.

Irigaray has notoriously been challenged by Sokal in his ‘Fashionable Nonsense’, but it’s unclear whether he simply misunderstands her or is onto something. The issue is that Irigaray states that physics has a masculine bias because it focusses on solid mechanics rather than fluids and also that E=mc² prioritises c as it’s the “fastest” constant. Irigaray also uses mathematical terminology without seeming to understand what it means. Sokal regards all of this as uninformed and unscientific, and as creating illusory profundity. Lacan is sometimes seen as having done the same with his focus on the Borromean Knot.

It has to be said that this feels like some bloke with unearned self-assurance wading into an academic field and explaining things to a woman, whether or not that’s what actually happened. It’s like Richard Dawkins’ fight with Mary Midgley. Irigaray is not trying to do science here but something like psychoanalysis or semiotics, so the question may be about whether what she’s doing is worthwhile compared to what a male scientist might be doing. It’s quite close to being an art vs. science debate. Irigaray has a practice of what’s been called “mimesis”, where she uses scientific terminology to subvert it from within. She may also be trying to show how anti-language is used, and as such it seems to have worked almost too well with Sokal. It is also true that the likes of turbulence and chaos, as reflected for example in how blood flows through the circulatory system in pathological situations and in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change, should be considered more seriously than it has been. Sokal has been accused of scientism, which is the idea that the findings of science are the only important set of views.

One of her aims was to make it clear that scientists and in fact the culture in general was unconsciously perceiving things from a masculine perspective. So for example, many scientific papers and other writing uses the “editorial we”, which is of course gender-neutral in most European languages, but in fact that “we” usually refers either to men or to women who have been induced to adopt a male-centred approach.

‘Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ – is among her most important works. Now this is an interesting title, bringing to mind the idea that the female body is the default from which the male form deviates, which is how things are among most mammals including humans and meaning that the female sex is not a sex but simply the standard, unmarked and straightforward human form. However, strangely, she seems to mean the opposite. It’s a collection of essays including the eponymous one. Her view, and I’d agree with this, is that the patriarchal view of sex has historically been that the male is the unmarked and the female is either denied or seen as a deviation. The essay itself is about the Freudian idea of penis envy, which it deconstructs. The vagina is literally a sheath or a hole rather than a thing in itself and the clitoris is ignored completely. It does make sense that in a male-dominated society these things are made to be so and do assume such significance although she seeks to deconstruct this too. It’s also interesting that it seems to be autoeroticism which is the contrast to heterosexual penetrative sex rather than lesbianism for her, although this does provide some kind of solitary self-sufficiency, but it omits the solidarity of women together needing each other and not needing men, which seems like a missed opportunity. She also posits the idea that heterosexual sex for a man involves a sadistic fantasy into which women can only insert themselves in a masochistic role, which seems to be an unrealistic generalisation about the male psyche, doesn’t allow for the existence of masochistic men and also for masochistic women whose masochism is deeply in accord with their desires. It seems, in other words, to be kink-shaming. This reminds me of Andrea Dworkin’s views as expressed in ‘Intercourse’, where Dworkin seems to describe a willing submissive role as in some sense morally wrong for women, presumably because of failure of solidarity with other women in this respect. Overall, I do actually find what Irigaray says as rather unsatisfactory and unfair on women, regardless of her view of men.

‘Speculum de l’autre femme’ preceded the other work, and I’ve not read it. This is also a collection of essays which as I understand it analyse male thinkers in terms of their phallocentrism. Published in 1974, this seems long overdue for the time and it could suffer from the problem hindsight imposes on some cultural phenomena of making them seem trite and tired simply because their ideas were ground-breaking and then adopted widely, so it may be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary her ideas were at the time. She asserts that female sexuality is like a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis because of its prior focus on males and their sexuality. I’m intensely curious about whether the speculum referred to is not just a metaphorical mirror but a reference to the gynecological instrument. I’m assuming it is, but as I say I haven’t read it.

There is a third prominent author of this kind whom I’ve not read and who seems to be less well-known in the Anglosphere but equally prominent in the French-speaking world, namely Hélène Cixous. Her most famous work is the 1976 ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ – ‘The Medusa’s Laugh’ – which calls for the development of écriture feminine, also referred to as writing with white ink, the metaphor being partly connected to breast milk. I know even less about her than I do the other two, but I do know that Irigaray shared the idea of using female-centred language and I’m guessing this is similar.
In what I’ve written, I may have come across as quite dismissive of the ideas and writing of these thinkers. I feel that I may have missed something in knowing practically nothing about French literature, but it does seem to me that there is an attachment to words and language here which is not about communication and clarity, and therefore not about sharing wisdom and being open to the wisdom of others. There seems to be an arrogance to it which I guess is inherited from Lacan. Another aspect of this is the fairly vapid nature of psychoanalysis itself. I see it as a necessary early stage of depth psychology, i.e. the kind of stuff you talk about in counselling and psychotherapy, but in my own training in psychology and psychiatry it’s notable that other paradigms are much more evidence-based and helpful, and psychoanalytical concepts as applied to non-conforming behaviour and presumably the states of mind associated with those are simply an unnecessarily elaborate mind game.

However, all of that must be placed in context, some of which is sympathetic to feminism and some of which is more to do with intersectionality. I actively avoided reading any feminist texts other than those I was compelled to do as course requirements for two reasons. One was that I regarded those texts as for women and explicitly excluding me, and it was important for them to have their own space. The other is that due to constructing myself as a man, I felt that feminist theory would be beyond me in the same way as mainstream literature is: I lacked the ability to respond to or understand it properly. I suppose this is a little like the chora, in that I wanted there to be a nurturing space for women to find their own authenticity. Obviously I’ve abandoned all that now (and I’m edging into dodgy territory). The intersectional approach is more hostile to this theorising. One of the most peculiar experiences I’ve had with respect to gender politics is when I read ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ by Carol J Adams, where she made the startlingly false assertion that it surprises some people that so many feminists are vegetarian/vegan (“vegn”). My own experience of that was precisely the opposite. It was notable to me that so few feminists were vegn, the reason for that apparently being that they regarded linguistic construction as central to consciousness and therefore rejected the possibility of non-human consciousness. Therefore, the whole time I’m engaged in this, I’m acutely aware of the possibility that these feminist theorists are hostile or apathetic about animal liberation and may also be White supremacists. All of these people are White and European and seem to be oblivious of those facts, and that makes it hard to trust their judgement.

All that said, it probably is worthwhile reading them and I plan to do so.

Racism And Islamophobic Racism

Someone asked a question the other day about Islamophobia and why that would be counted as racism, and also discussed racism as such, so I thought it might be worth talking about it in a little more depth. I’m aware I’ve done this before, but probably not from this angle. It’s also on my mind a bit after an exchange with a White acquaintance a week or so ago which is worth revisiting.

Last week, then, some people from here went to Carlisle for a counter-demonstration to the racist protest there, including my acquaintance. I made a very common statement which I expected him to agree with, that all White people are racist. He challenged me on this and I realised I didn’t have a ready answer, so it’s worth going into more depth on this matter.

I am an extremely lucky person. I was born in the developed world in just about the mid-twentieth century CE, I’m human, White, able-bodied, my first language is English and I’m middle class. I’m privileged in most of the ways anyone can be, and it’s important to remember this because of the “let them eat cake” (yes, I know nobody said that) obliviousness this gifts me with. I’m at the top of almost every pile. I’m even from the English Home Counties. Being in such a position means that to me, many issues are abstract and have little to no effect on my quality of life. I’m out of touch in ways which may very well harm others. This might sound like self-flagellation but it isn’t. It simply means that I am as valuable and worthwhile as any other person while also having the luxury of privilege, and of course many people in other categories rightly envy my position and might want to swap if that was possible. People who are less privileged than me might find it hard to understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama lacks privilege that they might have, and they do have a point because past a certain line sheer wealth cushions one from the effects of prejudice. However, a poor working-class White man is unlikely, for example, to be transvestigated to the extent Michelle Obama has been. In case you don’t know, there are probably thousands of people who see Barack and Michelle Obama as a gay male couple and Michelle as a trans woman, partly because White ideals of femininity refer to a White ideal female body. It’s very likely that Michelle Obama is protected from potential assassins, but she has to be protected like other powerful figures, and in her case the risk is greater than it would be for someone like Bill Clinton, or for that matter a poor working-class White bloke in England. Hence White privilege, and for that matter fragility, do exist.

This bit is going to be a rehash of a previous post I’ve now lost on ethnicity. The San people, also known as the “Bushmen”, of South Africa and adjacent states, are genetically unusually diverse for a human group. Interestingly, they’re more likely to be albino than any other such group, and although people always intermarry they can be thought of mainly as the sister group to the rest of humanity. One way in which this has been expressed is that it’s easily possible for two San individuals to be as different genetically as an average Irish person is from an average Sri Lankan. There’s nothing special about those two selections incidentally. I could equally well say the average Fuegan and the average Australian Aboriginal. There is also more variation within Afrika than outside it, genetically, so if we are going to divide people into ethnicities genetically, they may as well consist of a number of Afrikan races plus a single race comprising the people of the Sahara and everyone else. This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because Central Asia also has a lot of variation compared to the rest of the planet. Speaking of Central Asia, however, there is a small group somewhere in the Himalayas, if I remember correctly, which is considerably genetically distinct from others but is never regarded as a separate ethnicity in spite of the fact that the average difference between it and other races is as big as between White people and Native Americans, for example. I’ve seen a claim that it’s the Tajiks. If it is, the Tajiks to most people are basically slightly different from Persians in a similar way to the French and English being different. But I don’t know.

Some species are more diverse than others. Cheetahs and Beluga whales are known for being particularly genetically similar within their respective species. On the other hand, there’s a species of roundworm, Caenorhabditis brenneri, whose genes are the most diverse of any known animal species, being as different as lions and tigers even though they’re in the same genus as the famous Caenorhabditis elegans and in a whole phylum of animals which are very difficult for non-experts to tell apart. Humans nowadays are very genetically homogenous because of an incident, possibly the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano seventy-four thousand years ago, which by fifty thousand years ago left fewer than a thousand humans alive outside Afrika. There are some other species similarly affected at the same time such as the other great apes, macaques, the aforementioned cheetah and tigers (which I understand to be several species so I’m not sure what that means). On the whole, species are a lot more diverse than these, so we as humans, or rather Homo sapiens, are starting out from being remarkably similar to each other compared to most other species. Other species, ourselves included, can sometimes be thought of as having subspecies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably what Neanderthals were compared to us. That’s not the case for us any more, and hasn’t been so for many, many millennia. I have in my life been able to identify one person who was most genetically different from myself in that she probably had significant numbers of genes from Denisovan ancestors, and so far as I was concerned she was an Indonesian woman whose ethnicity as an Indonesian was more significant to her and others than her genetic makeup, even though she would’ve been dramatically unlike nearby neighbours in that country. It just didn’t matter, and in human terms the differences were really extreme.

My point, of course, is that we’re all mongrels. We’re all mixtures genetically. Moreover, the features on which we tend to focus as White people such as eye shape, skin tone, hair texture and shape of lips are not significant and don’t mean anything in terms of other features. It would be as easy to divide people up by other genetic characteristics such as blood group, tissue type or ability to digest various different compounds in food, which would have more important implications for everyone but would show groups of people which wouldn’t mean very much at all to us. There is basically no biological significance in what White people think of races. It may be true that dark skin protects it from sunlight damage but there are other inherited traits with other benefits elsewhere. Some people might have a genetic propensity not to be able to digest a particular species of caterpillar, which could be very significant in communities where they’re regularly eaten but we don’t use that to divide people up. We do do that with gluten intolerance but we don’t usually think about that in racial terms.

Hence there is no biological basis to race, or rather, its biological basis is arbitrarily decided from a biological perspective. What there is, and this is a social phenomenon, is racialisation. White people have decided that there are separate races, including White people who are in some way the “neutral” race and therefore usually have the privilege of not being aware of their own ethnicity without that being a potential problem for them. Hence we tend to be unaware of racism. It doesn’t quite work that way because, for example, English people tend to view the Irish as somewhat different and there can be prejudice against Ashkenazic Jews and White Eastern Europeans. Groups which are racialised basically have no choice but to be aware of racism. This means that our White privilege makes us able to be oblivious and therefore ignorant of the very real phenomenon of racism.

It often makes more sense to think of racism not as something people do so much as a structural and institutional problem from which White people benefit and racialised people suffer. One way this might help White people to accept our racism is to recognise that racist is simply something we are without seeing it as something which we accuse other White people of and of which we’re innocent. Apart from anything else, whether or not we’re actively racist, the point at which we decide other White people are racist and we aren’t is the end of us working to reduce our own racism and pursue anti-racism, which as White people is more our responsibility than that of racialised groups. It isn’t really the job of Black people to educate us about how we’re racist because we’re responsible for our ignorance and they suffer from it. It’s foisted upon them, and we do it to them, however passively, and passivity is tacit compliance. And again, this might sound like a guilt trip placed on myself and other White people, but it isn’t. It’s simply the recognition that we are racist and we need to do something about it.

A related feature of Whiteness is our fragility. This is also called White defensiveness, and describes our reluctance to talk about the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and downplaying the seriousness of racism. Another claim is of reverse racism, i.e. that White people also face prejudice. Accusations of this based on diversity-related affirmative action were once compared to the idea that having a wheelchair ramp into a building which occupies most of the width of some steps is prejudiced against able-bodied people. There clearly does seem to be “pulling the ladder up”-style racism, as with a group of a certain ethnicity then denying fair consideration to members of other, or even the same, minority groups. The Conservative cabinet in Westminster is notorious for doing this. Some research has been done into whether reverse racism exists, and it appears that it doesn’t in this respect, in the sense that it doesn’t impair opportunities to implement such policies. The idea that racism operates equally significantly or comparably between ethnicities is related to the idea that there are clear-cut biologically-based major categories of human populations between which prejudice occurs rather than the more accurate model that there are those able to escape racialisation and those who have been racialised. One thing which does happen, though, is that there can be prejudice between ethnic minorities, which serves White supermacists well through divisiveness.

Before I get to Islamophobia, I want to talk about anti-semitism as it informs the way Islamophobia is rightly understood as a form of racism. The Jewish people as an ethnicity have at least three aspects to their identity: genetic affinity, culture and faith. Jewish people are generally understood as people whose mothers are Jewish, but many people in that category don’t identify as Jewish. There are rarely also converts to the Jewish faith, which would make them Jewish, and people who marry into the faith are kind of “Jewish-adjacent” and may or may not have Jewish children. Not all Jewish people are White, and in fact it could be argued that being Jewish entails not being White, something worth analysing. First of all, skin tone varies a lot between people who are genetically 100% Jewish, such as the Beth Israel originating in Ethiopia, the Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. These people are subject to racism within their communities. There are also straightforwardly Black converts to Judaism such as Sammy Davis Jr. Secondly, there is a sense in which they are non-White in a similar way to the Roma and the Irish are in England, i.e. there is plainly explicit and conscious racism against them because they’re not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their skin tone in this situation is no protection against racism. Nonetheless, there may be no genetic difference at all between them and White people. Imagine two identical twins, one of whom converts to the Jewish faith. These two people would be of different ethnicities.

It doesn’t take much thought to see parallels between anti-Semitism and Islam here. Anti-semitism can be prejudice against people who are physically identical to Gentiles. These are in a small minority but they exist. Thinking back to my time in the English East Midlands, I knew at least three White English converts to Islam and a family of Albanians who to me just looked the same as White English people and were Muslims simply because Albania is an Islamic majority country. Nonetheless these people would’ve met with prejudice because of being Muslim. Many Albanians are culturally Islamic as opposed to being practicing Muslims, so they’re Muslim in the same way as Richard Dawkins is, in his own words, “culturally Christian”. Islamophobia can operate against Albanians even in their own country. Ethnic cleansing against Albanians has been called for by Albanian far-right groups, the state sponsors the promotion of Christianity over Islam and there have been attacks against women in hijabs, who have been called “terrorists”. I probably don’t need to mention what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s CE. There’s also often equation between Muslims and Arabs. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the world and is not part of the Arab world. But like anti-semitism, Islamophobia is clearly racism. Besides this comparison, when you also consider the unfounded idea that racism other than these examples is based on biological differences in any significant way, then yes, Islamophobia is a form of racism. It isn’t so much co-opted in as that other forms of racism are more similar to it than often realised.

The other thing I want to stress is that racism is something which exists in White people without us needing to commit any voluntary racist acts. We’re able to operate in the world as if racism doesn’t exist, and that obliviousness is a luxury others lack and don’t owe it to us to explain, but we do owe it to them to identify how what we do is racist and what we can do to oppose racism. For instance, a job application might enable someone’s ethnicity to be identified simply through their life history and addresses, which have then been picked up by AI and used to profile a typical successful applicant, and even though the AI may be oblivious of their race, it bakes in and perpetuates racism. There are micro-aggressions, such as praising someone on their language because one assumes their first language isn’t the same as yours. That’s absolutely not intentional but it is insensitive. You might look at a photo of, say, a church website or an environmental conservation or country rambling group and only see pictures of White people without being aware of what that might imply or questioning why that might be. There are all sorts of things.

In conclusion, although there clearly is such a thing as malicious and conscious racism, the more insidious aspects of White racism that I’ve mentioned here may have a bigger impact, and this is something which disadvantages us all because we need diversity. Otherwise, we may have something like the banana plant cultivation problem: homogenous similar strains of bananas subject to being wiped out all at once by infectious diseases to which all of them respond in the same way. Monoculture is dangerous and needs to be avoided for all of us. Diversity is a strength which racism works against.

Herstoricity

“Afrika”, “herstory”, “Latinx”, “womon”, “womxn”, “womyn”: all of these words have been celebrated and irritated. Two of them have ethnic significance and all but one are clearly linked to feminism. Even “Afrika” could be linked to feminism, but that’s a longer conversation, which may nonetheless take place here. Hence this post partly belongs in the Other Place, but I’m putting it here due to its ambiguity.

I’ll go through them one by one.

“Afrika” originates from Haki R. Madhubuti, a poet of the Afrikan diaspora born in Arkansas, apparently first used in 1973. He explains the spelling thus:

I have talked about AfriKa before on here but can’t find the post. Apart from the odd spelling of “germain” in this passage, the first thing which strikes me about it is its apparent historical inaccuracy, and this is possibly one of the more important points I’d like to address here.

There are a number of theories regarding the origin of the word “Africa”. One of these is that it’s linked to “April” and “apricity”, as in “the sunny place”. It’s probably worth noting that being a whole continent, not all of Afrika is in fact sunny. Lesotho, for example, decidedly isn’t. It may also be Ancient Egyptian in origin, from “Afru-Ika”, meaning “motherland”. If this last is true, it is at least arguably accurate since until recently the consensus scientific view was that we originated on that continent and the actual species Homo sapiens is from there although the other species with which we interbred weren’t always Afrikan. It also has the merit of being a word from an Afrikan language. However, it’s also clear that if “Afru-Ika” is indeed Egyptian, it wouldn’t’ve been written with a K because the language never used Latin script, although Coptic does use an adapted Greek alphabet with some demotic Egyptian letters so if it ever did get written in Coptic, it would’ve used a Kappa. Although I thought Afrika was referred to in the Book of Acts, I can’t find any such reference, but in that same book and elsewhere, Ethiopians are mentioned, which has been one way Afrika was mentioned in Europe in the past. In Ge`ez, “the Ethiopian eunuch” is called ” ኢትዮጵያዊው ጃንደረባ”, and there’s definitely no K in that, which gives rise to one of my puzzles about this issue: Afrikan languages use all sorts of non-Latin scripts which have nothing which looks like the letter K in them. To give a very incomplete list, there are the multiple West Afrikan scripts such as Vai, the Berber script Tamazight, the Arabic abjad, the Ethiopian abugida and the various Ancient Egyptian scripts. The Coptic alphabet does include a K. It is true that the letter C is often a bit of an oddity in languages written with the Latin script because its pronunciation varies more, but it’s also the case that the idea that “Afrika” is spelt with a K edges into “not even wrong” territory because many of the scripts used for Afrikan languages aren’t even alphabets and don’t have letters in the Latin sense, so they don’t have an equivalent for K as an isolated sound.

However, maybe this is not the point, and I could of course launch into a further tirade on the history of the word’s spelling, noting that in particular “Afrika” is the German and Afrikaans spelling, and I’m guessing also the Flemish one, which opens a horrifying chapter in Afrikan colonial history. It’s factually incorrect that no European language other than Dutch and German has the hard C sound, so this inaccuracy bothers me. I’m also far from convinced that most Afrikan languages spell it with a K, and if they do whether those are widely spoken or otherwise used languages, although majority languages do have issues of their own. These are, though, not the only points Madhubuti raises. The K can symbolise Afrikans “coming back together again” without there needing to be an historical (very aware of that word too right now) justification. After all, the uses of the X in “Latinx” and “womxn” are not historical and that may not matter.

The third reason given feels like something I’m not qualified to comment on since I’m neither Afrikan nor part of the Afrikan diaspora. It comes from a Pan-Africanist approach, significantly a global movement which stresses common ground and mutual support by all people of Afrikan heritage within and outwith the Afrikan continent, focussing on the latter via the slave trade. The four words used have different sources, being respectively from (ki?)Swahili, Akan (actually Nkrumah), Swahili again and West Afrika. Now I recognise that because all of these cultures are Black, they may be unified by the effect of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, but I’m also not sure as the world’s Whitest person whether unifying those concepts under the same heading is positive or negative. Madhubati then builds on that by saying that using the K is a sign of an Afrikan lingua franka, an interesting subversion of Latin which introduces a K into a language which rarely uses it. I feel also that I should point out that a basically nullifying version of the idea of the Afrikan diaspora would include me in two senses as part of it. One of these is the trivial and probably annoying observation that all living humans have Afrikan heritage because our species is from Afrika. The other is the slightly less trivial but still quite appropriative fact that I actually do have recent Afrikan ancestry, but this has little to no bearing on my Whiteness because nowadays I am practically universally perceived as White, which does in fact make me White, and in fact very White indeed.

On the subject of Latin, the word “Africa” itself was initially used by the Romans to refer to a province of the Empire on the southern Mediterranean coast. This was in a sense another form of colonialism, so the use of the C there is equally colonialist except that it was imposing on the Phoenician script used there at the time. There is a bit of a side-issue about whether Roman imperialism was similar to the later European version, and the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire is also different to that of the Atlantic slave trade, but I’ve already gone on about this a fair bit so I’ll stop at this point and move on to another.

The main issue here may be that it isn’t the history that matters. When we use words in everyday life, we usually don’t pay much attention to their etymology or shift in meaning. The word “nice”, as I’ve said, is one of several words which change their meaning regularly, along with “silly” and “gay”. These all have overlapping meanings from time to time, and a fourth associate member of this group is “blessed”. We do tend to focus on these more than most others because they’re unusually fluid, but on the whole we don’t. Likewise, the word “necklace”, with many others, has an obvious form which can be broken down to reveal an older meaning, but we seldom consider this. This is because, on the whole, words interact with each other and are used in a contemporary way and their etymology is not the central issue. “Afrika” with a K may or may not have historicity.

Or herstoricity? What would that even mean? To state a very obvious and widely known fact, “history” is etymologically from the Latin word “historia”, itself from the Greek ἱστορία, and is linked to the word “story”. The Latin third person feminine and masculine possessive adjective (their analogue to our “her” and “his”) is “sua”, which varies according to the possessed thing and not the gender of the possessor. Hence there is very clearly no etymological link between the word “history” and “his”. However, this is almost irrelevant because to someone who knows English, it sounds like “his story” and an informative play on words can emphasise that history is written by the winners, i.e. men. That said, the Romance languages assign their word for “history” to the feminine, as “historia” is a feminine noun ending in A in the singular nominative.

“Herstory” first seems to have been used in 1970 by Robin Morgan. It’s been criticised by Richard Dawkins along the lines of its etymology, which as I’ve said is irrelevant because language is rarely used that way. Others regard it as a falsification of history because it allegedly emphasises certain things unrealistically and distorts the story. There have also been women historians before the twentieth century, whose expressed views tend to be those of men historians. It could also be criticised as insufficiently intersectional: is it perhaps the herstory of White women, for example? How much herstory is seen from a Latinx perspective?

“Latinx” is mainly a New World-centred concept. The X is there because some Romance languages tend to gender the adjective and adjectival noun “Latina”/”Latino” for women and girls on the one hand and men and boys on the other. In general, over most extensive texts or speeches, a person referring to themselves in such a language will reveal their gender because this is how they work grammatically. There seems also to be a weaker tendency than in some other languages with grammatical gender to ascribe genders inconsistently, as used to happen in English with “woman” being masculine and “wife” neuter. Hence the X. However, there’s a separate issue here which might also come into play with the issue of pan-Africanism. It seems to this White person typing this, whose ethnicity might mean that pan-Africanism glosses over important cultural and other differences among Afrikans which might be important, and “Latinx” seems to do the same.

“Latinx” is a term coined in the early 21st century CE. The idea is partly to avoid the forced self-gendering of using the equivalent words ending in A and O, and I think to an extent to be gender-neutral when referring to someone. It is, however, rather controversial for a couple of reasons. One is that it could be culturally imperialist because it seems to have been coined by Anglophones and doesn’t work in the actual languages themselves. Another is that it refers to a whole swathe of people who may not see themselves as similar at all and seems to exclude other people whom one might think are included such as Spaniards, Portuguese, the French, Swiss and Walloons, people from Angola and Mozambique, Cajuns and Quebecois. Within the “Hispanic” community there are also native Americans, Sephardic Jews and people of mainly European descent. This is parallel in some ways to the “Afrika with a K” situation, since Afrika is the second largest continent with a host of ethnicities and nations and the idea seems to have started outside it. The majority of “Latinx” people in the US dislike the term and possibly consider it racist. I’m not sure what womyn think about it.

I’m going to consider the three “wom*n” terms together. “Womon” and “womyn” are older and linked. The idea behind these is to remove the morphemes “man” and “men” from the word for women, for want of a better word. The first is singular, the other plural. “Wimmin” is also used for the plural, and “womban” is found sometimes. Etymologically this is naïve because the etymology of “woman” is “wifman”, i.e. “person who is a woman” and there are cis women born without wombs, cis women with more than one womb and cis women who have had hysterectomies, so “wombman” could be seen as reducing “women” to their reproductive systems and is quite tactless as well. However, the latter is more important than the former, as it’s clear that etymology is not particularly important most of the time. There are also a couple of extinct words for men which are formed in a similar way, namely “ƿerman” (“person who is a man”) and “ƿæpman” (“person whose role is to bear a weapon”). These died out because of the sexist assumption that “man” is the default. I have to admit that recently I’ve watched quite a few programmes with werewolves in them and noticed that whereas I definitely think of the word “werewolf” as masculine, most people seem not to notice the incongruity of using it for women, when a better word might be “wifewolf” or the apparently gender-neutral “lycanthrope”. This etymological thicket is, though, more interesting than influential.

The word “wimmin” is older and not deliberately coined. It’s been used as part of spelling reform, as “women” is an accurate depiction of neither the morphemes nor the etymology of the word, and is also used in a mocking way to indicate that the speaker or writer is uneducated. For instance, it gets used in Popeye comic strips. As such it’s unlike the others, which originated in 1976 in connection with the now-controversial Michigan Womyn’s Festival. It tends to be associated with lesbian separatism, a movement which has now become unpopular because it’s seen as faking lesbianism, and because of this is now rather an obscure pair of words. I don’t know if this has ever been done, but a back-formation would be possible using the words “mon” and “myn” for men. “Mon” already existed in Anglo-Saxon times and is of course also found, with no direct historical connection, in Afro-Caribbean English. There’s potential for “mon” and “myn” to mean something like “person with a penis”, unlike “womxn”.

“Womxn”, the final of many, though perhaps less prominent, examples of this mentioned here, has an intention which might be seen as athwart “womon”, although when it was invented in the 1970s the two were similar. However, it didn’t become at all popular until the late ‘teens, by which time it was in opposition to “womon” in attempting to include both cis and trans women. Since I try to avoid discussing gender identity issues on here, that’s all I’m going to say about it.

To conclude, I’ll try to extract some common themes, using bullet points:

• Etymology is largely irrelevant to these neologisms.
• There is often resistance to them.
• It can be a futile exercise to change language, but it can also succeed. The word “quiz” is a possible example of a word introduced deliberately, but I don’t think it was already given a meaning.
• These linguistic elements can have a slacktivist tendency, serving as substitutes for something which takes deeper thought, effort and dialogue.
• Sometimes these coinages are imposed from without and have an appropriative flavour.

To be honest, I don’t know what I think, and that’s probably because of my privilege. If I were on the other side of some of these moves, I might be able to judge them more fairly. As it is, in most ways my identity is that of the oppressor. Also, viewing a group from a distance and without fully authentic and lived experience can lead to an apparent homogenisation, as seems to be reflected in “Afrika” and “Latinx”, and perhaps others.