Not Anonymous

I definitely understand and appreciate your desire to not have your intellectual ability reduced to your anatomy. However, the argument I'm seeing you make here (and it's a very common argument that is too often left unexamined) is that it's okay to minimize you as a person based on your intelligence and use language with a history of categorizing people based on that intellectual ability; just don't make it about you being a woman.

I call upon Stanton: "In our Southern States even, before the war, women were not degraded below the working population. They were not humiliated in seeing their coachmen, gardeners, and waiters go to the polls to legislate for them; but here, in this boasted Northern civilization, women of wealth and education, who pay taxes and obey the laws, who in morals and intellect are the peers of our proudest rulers, are thrust outside the pale of political consideration with minors, paupers, lunatics, traitors, idiots..." (Jan. 19, 1869, address to the National Women Suffrage Convention in DC)

Disability (particularly mental) is a comparison many people make in defending rights and humanity of other oppressed groups--in fact nearly all if not all movements based on challenging oppression (other than disability) are frequently argued on the basis of: these people are not physically or mentally inferior or disabled. Which reinforces the idea that disabled folks do in fact merit being treated as lesser, and makes it rather hard for those of us with disabilities to support activism in favor of other parts of ourselves. (See: me nearly walking out of a "Talking to the Media" presentation by NCTE, the Transgender puppet organization of the HRC which is the US assimilation-focused gay/lesbian group but I didn't know NCTE's background at the time. They said it's good to talk about transfolks in positive ways instead of negative: replace "Transpeople are not mentally ill" with "Transpeople are healthy." I said "What about those of us with mental illness compounded by experiencing transphobia, or the high rate of HIV and AIDS among transfolks?" They said "This is about getting the most important message now. Those are issues we can address later.")

Does this make sense?

Douglas Baynton has an excellent essay on this BTW: "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History" in Longmore and Umansky's "The New Disability History". Strongly recommended, and it's obviously US-centric but I recommend it anyway.


As to words and context: it is amazing the hurdles most people will make in the US (or at least on the West Coast) to avoid calling someone they don't want to offend "fat"--it has very negative connotations. Folks in fat-positive activism are making efforts to reclaim the word. This is an example of where who can use a reclaimed word gets complicated, as they encourage everyone regardless of size to use the word as a descriptor and without negative connotation. Meanwhile in Portland, where there's a whole lot of queer folks, although homophobia is certainly plenty present it's more common to see people use "queer" than "GLBT" in reference to the relevant community and organizations--and by people I mean of any sexuality, in official general-public publications, and in a way that is generally not taken as offensive; just as descriptive. Which isn't to say no one who might be targeted by the term in a pejorative manner is bothered by it. At the same time, "dyke", "faggot" and "tranny" are terms that generally aren't used by straight/cisgendered people or official non-queer-specific publications that don't intend to offend.

So on that point, in short, I don't think all reclaimed words can be considered equal, and I agree that context is relevant--in fact I argue that context is relevant to the point of which words can be reclaimed how, when, and by whom.