So I havent posted the assignment yet, i'm working on it diego :/ But I saw this poster, it made me laugh and I thought I should share it. If people thought about it this way, there might be less controversy.
This is actually really interesting because it points out how people tend to see a need to constantly label or define each other in order to make more sense of their own social identities.
It goes back to the issue of the "unmarked", or "the given" (with all of its harmful assumptions), which we've talked about in class. This is a linguistic battle with multiple "material" consequences -- this notion of who gets to own the "unmarked word." Another example is how we often use "American" to mean "all of us" yet we add adjectives to speak about "African Americans", "Asian Americans", "Native Americans", or even "Gay Americans." The notion of "American" as presumably white and fully/unquestionably heterosexualized is thus repetitively reiterated.
I really like the way it portrays the lack of sense in labeling everything in order to feel that things are homogeneous. No one is different and putting a label to everything is very energy consuming.
So I havent posted the assignment yet, i'm working on it diego :/ But I saw this poster, it made me laugh and I thought I should share it. If people thought about it this way, there might be less controversy.
This is actually really interesting because it points out how people tend to see a need to constantly label or define each other in order to make more sense of their own social identities.
ReplyDeleteIt goes back to the issue of the "unmarked", or "the given" (with all of its harmful assumptions), which we've talked about in class. This is a linguistic battle with multiple "material" consequences -- this notion of who gets to own the "unmarked word." Another example is how we often use "American" to mean "all of us" yet we add adjectives to speak about "African Americans", "Asian Americans", "Native Americans", or even "Gay Americans." The notion of "American" as presumably white and fully/unquestionably heterosexualized is thus repetitively reiterated.
ReplyDeleteI really like the way it portrays the lack of sense in labeling everything in order to feel that things are homogeneous. No one is different and putting a label to everything is very energy consuming.
ReplyDelete