My senior year of college I sat in on a meeting of faculty, administrators, and students. Our goal: brainstorm ideas for more inclusive language in the upcoming student handbook. Inclusive meant girls now allowed, and sexist language would not only be eliminated from all college literature, it would also be officially frowned upon.
Typical political correctness stuff. Typical ivory tower stuff.
The meeting began with a discussion of what we would call the new guidelines for gender neutral language. “Guidelines” wasn’t strong enough; “rules” was too strong. So the women’s studies professors got out their mental thesauri and started bandying around different terms.
This went on for half an hour. Finally I said, “As long as you don’t call it a papal edict, no one is going to care.” Then I left.
How could these intellectuals, these doctors of belaboring, put so much emphasis on a single word? Did they really think they could effect change with one linguistic meme?
Feminists and their propensity toward placing value on linguistic memes has given us: herstory, womyn, flight attendant, and Xena.
At one point you really need to ask yourself, “Can changing the language change a person’s perception?”
Just ask the women of Lebanon. They’ll say yes.
In the Arabic language (about which I know nothing), the accent is placed below the words when addressing women and above the words when addressing men. When no accent is present, like in public places or billboards, the accent defaults to the above position and addresses men. Not very inclusive.
Rather than bemoan how this isn’t fair, the women of the Khede Kasra Arab Women Empowerment Program started a public campaign to deliberately put the accent underneath and in essence, directly speak to the females of the Arab world.
In a delightfully fortuitous twist, kasra, the name of the accent used when addressing women, also means “habit.” Hence the strategic placement of the accent also took on the meaning, “Break the habit and get things moving.”
The first three accented words to get things moving were, “responsibility, willpower, and right.” The campaign spread to the nightly news and radio stations.
Watch the video of the Khede Kasra campaign.
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September 10th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Muslimah Media Watch » Is Women’s Empowerment as Simple as Drawing a Line? Thoughts on the Khede Kasra Campaign said:
[...] applauded the initiative, others questioned the approach. Tracey McCormick, in her article “Rock the Kasra“, asked a question for those who believe language can be a way of changing ideologies: How [...]
November 11th, 2009 at 3:01 am