Crafting language, defining self

Historically, minority groups like lesbians, gays, and transexuals have been defined by two groups of people, "authorities" and hostile persons. The first group has included doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, law-makers, scholars, and more recently, activists. The definitions given to queer people by these groups were often negative, as in "gayness is a mental disorder." Though homosexuality was finally removed from psychiatry's bible, the DSM, transexualism still remain coded in it as "Gender Identity Disorder," and anyone wanting "sex-change" surgery must first submit to psychological examination and be found to have this disorder.

The second group is composed of those hateful individuals who have historically defined queer persons negatively through derogatory labels and abusive language in general. The word "queer" itself was originally an insult hurled at anyone who was seen as deviating from rigid social gender roles. It is only recently that the term has been appropriated by the lgbtq community and its meaning re-crafted to inspire pride instead of shame and fear.*

However, there has been an increasing push in lgbtq communities for self-definition, for the right to establish the parameters of one's own identity according to one's own self-perception, rather than being told who and what one is by those with a less than positive view of queerness. This drive for self-definition encountered some obstacles in language itself: there were no positive terms - and sometimes no words at all - that described the sense of self of many lgbtq people. The obvious solution was to simply create the necessary language, which is precisely what many people did (for a partial list of gender terms I have encountered click here).

On the surface, these are just words, desriptive words, but words none-the-less. However, as any linguist or symbolic anthropologist would tell you, words have the power to shape and define our concepts of the world and of our selves. Each word represents an idea, or often a multitude of ideas, that get applied to whatever or whomever the word gets attached to. This is especially true of gender terms - "man" and "woman" are loaded terms, carrying with them centuries of baggage concerning dress, talk, walk, ability, appropriate activities etc. "Man" does not simply designate an individual, but also a significant part of that individual's place in the social order, even in our current, supposedly enlightened society. "Man" still brings home the bacon - much more of it than "woman," anyhow.

So in considering these new gender terms, we must look beyond the initial definition of biological female who is a man inside," or whatever the particulars of the case, and examine what additional baggage may be coming on board for the ride. This is especially true when you consider that definitions of sex, gender, and sexuality are typically co-dependent. For example, if you define sexuality in terms of which gender one prefers, you have to bring on board your definition of gender. And if your definition of gender is in any way connected to biological sex, either positively or negatively (as in "I got the wrong body" scenarios), then biological sex is along for the ride as well. If you think about it, it should not be hard to see that these connections are there in a good many scenarios, due to the way we have contructed our ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality to begin with.That said, each new word that gets coined to describe a personal experience of sex, gender, or sexuality should have some relation to all three realms, whether intended to or not.

Beyond that, we must consider the power of language to shape our self-conceptions. There is a substantial body of scholarly work on this topic with which I am unfortunately not yet too familiar,other than knowing that it exists. At the moment, I can only speculate on what I will find, but from my own personal experience, I know people tend to grow to fit a label as much as they may try to bend a label to fit their own experience. Start calling yourself a hippy or a playa or any other descriptive term of that type, and see if you don't start emphasizing or even introducing the corresponding viewpoints or behaviors in your life.

As I conduct my research I will be looking for the above phenomena to see how it may be taking place in lgbtq communities as individuals seek self-definition. There are several other concerns I hope to address as well, like how the spread of new terms help to change group membership, define new sub-groups, and simultaneously produce inclusiveness and isolation, but that is for another post.

As you go about your daily lives, stop now and then to consider the effect of the language you use and how it may help shape your own perceptions of reality. Do you like what you find? Or could your vocabulary use some tweeking? Just think of the possibilities.



*Using "queer" is currently hotly debated in some groups, as some feel it can never be appropriate due to its history. It is analogous to the use of the word "nigger" among black Americans.