View source for Words We Inherit, Words We Invent

<span style="font-size:20pt;">Reclaiming language as a feminist practice</span>

==IDEA==
::: How are feminist values encoded—or silenced—through language and publishing formats?
:: How do feminist movements use language to resist, redefine, or reclaim power?
::::How are definitions and glossaries sites of epistemic control — and how can they be reclaimed for feminist ends? Who defines meaning, and who gets to speak?
::How can a glossary be used as a feminist publishing method?
:::How are certain voices marginalized or excluded from meaning-making? What happens if definitions are open to multiple interpretations, narratives, or contradictions? 
::::Can glossaries be performative, open-ended, or generative rather than fixed? What happens if definitions are open to multiple interpretations, narratives, or contradictions?
::– Make my own feminist glossary – with the possibility for people to contribute to it in order to hear voices that mostly stay unheard. 
::::Why make it online and with that global? Different people all around the world make different experiences and in order to practice intersectionality it is important to also hear voices which widen your understanding of what it means to behave feministic in this day and age. 
:::A glossary is traditionally linear, authoritative, closed. But what if it was open-ended, networked, affective, or contradictory — like lived experience? Can definitions reflect lived experience, not just academic consensus? What happens to  a glossary if we abandon objectivity and embrace subjectivity?
::Who is it for and how should they feel using it?

===looks===
::– have a site for each letter and then a sub-site for each word. 
::– there is a submit button so people can contribute – how do I prevent spamming and not welcoming contributions? – Make a code of conduct/manifesto/rules for this project. – add positionality statement. (what terms or frameworks do I reject, and why?)
::– Do I moderate it? i should. 
::– Make it look like a mindmap. everything is interlinked, you can jump from one definition to another. – annotate where definitions come from: lived experience, literature, oral history, protest signs, etc. 
::–

==RESEARCH==
===On design, feminism, and friendship – Briar Levit===
::s.16 – Nowadays, girls have the vocabulary to express how they feel and how they want to be treated in explicitly feminist terms, with those discussions starting much earlier.
===Wordslut – Amanda Montell===
::s.4 – Over the Decades linguists have learned that pretty much every corner of language is touched by gender, from the most miscroscopic units of sound to the broadest categories of conversation.
::s.9 – Language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.
::s.10 – Its the way English is habitually used that "expresses (and so reproduces) some culturally ingrained sexist assumptions." This means –good news– the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they're not even aware of.
::s.26 – Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from refereneces to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or stereotypically feminine men.
::s.31 – When English speakers want to insult a women, they compare her to one of a few things; a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut). That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. Instead, it makes a clear statement about the expectations, hopes and fears of our society as a whole.
::s.39 – reclamation. people actively redefining what these words mean from the ground up.
::s.40 – There are also words like bitch, ho, dyke and cunt which are definitely still used abusively, but have also evolved as terms of endearment among women who use them inside their own groups (which is usually how a word’s reclamation begins — it’s when the rule of “I can cal myself this word, but you can’t” becomes more relaxed over time).
::s.41 – Perhaps when we call each other ho, we acknowledge that we are women who have sex and earn our own money too, and when we call each other bitch, we acknowledge the realities of this man-made world and affirm our abuts survive in it. Through resistance comes redefinition.
::s.42 – Semantic change down not happen overnight; instead, it’s a more gradual process wherein one meaning slowly overlaps another, then eclipses it. 
::s.44 – the first step we can take to reduce the harm caused by gendered insults is simply to avoid using them abusively.