Banned Words
Technicalities 42(5) Sept/Oct 2022: 11-14
A note from MIT Press came across Twitter the other day. It said:
Recently, one of our marketers discovered that Amazon does not allow “queer theory” to be included as a keyword in enhanced product descriptions (the fancy graphics you sometimes see at the bottom of a book page on Amazon).
She was uploading content for our new book by @alex_monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight.
The content was flagged automatically by an algorithm because using the word “queer” is–apparently–considered “a violation of community guidelines.”[1]
Even though they have not earned our trust as full partners in providing equitable access to information, I think we can assume that Amazon has benign reasons for banning the word queer: it is a hateful term. People conflate the First Amendment’s restriction on government from making laws that constrain freedom of speech with other civil actions that abridge speech, but is clear there are all kinds of prohibitions against the use of certain words. One of those restrictions—fair or not—is that media corporations can develop and enforce community standards on speech. Amazon wants to ban certain terms they think hurt their services, they are welcome to do it. Just we need to be clear they are adhering to a corporate media logic, not a moral logic. A bad word is one that drives away customers.
But, as we have seen with other terms of derision and malice—including “Quaker” for example—”queer” has been reappropriated by insiders, in what Coles calls an act of reclamation. Such reclaimed words often fall on generational lines,[2] and play a role in establishing group identity.[3] Which does not mean everyone can use “queer” whenever they want, in all situations and contexts, even for insiders. It means that insiders can use the term in culturally appropriate ways, and even then, such terms may be controversial. Along those generational lines, older members may be offended by such terms by younger members, wanting them to recognise and affirm the historic struggles of the past. Gay identity came about in part through a repudiation of terms now used by younger members. Citing research by Zwicky[4] from the late 1990s, Cole states that “Whereas younger speakers have tended to embrace ‘queer’ as a category term of pride, many older speakers consider the word irredeemably derogatory.”[5]
The Open Mesh
And those terms can even re-enter the general public discourse, as in the cases of “black” and “queer.” I think many of us would agree that “queer” has entered into even more common usage since the late 1990s, gaining status equal to that of “gay”, for example, with the addition of “Q” to the acronym “LGBQT.” One particular way is via its appearance in “queer theory” which, in its original formulation, was a concept akin to “the unclassifiable, at least in the ways that you think of classification.” In a foundational quote, Sedgwick says, in a not-quite-a-definition:
[O]ne of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.[6]
Jagose considers this point in her 1996 book, citing Halperin “There is nothing in particular to which [queer] necessarily refers”[7] and responding herself, says “Even more than the lesbian and gay models from which it has developed, queer evades programmatic description, because it is differently valued in different contexts.”[8] For a field concerned with classification, I think queer theory in this formulation poses significant challenges and opportunities for our work. It demands that our categories not be viewed as stable culture-free groupings, and that categories should be investigated, their histories revealed, and their boundaries and meanings fluid. It means not only catalogers but users should view our constructions as provisional, and we should find the means of meeting with our users on mutual grounds, seeking common understandings of books, topics, and the categories to which things are assigned. We need to explain the meanings of our categories. Our systems need to be open to meaning, nuance, and change.
There are ironies all around: gay people who hate the word in all contexts as do religious conservatives who are opposed to saying “queer” and “gay” in classrooms. The Library of Congress, which is still trying to adjust terminology suggested to them as offensive in the 1970s, adopted “Queer theory” as a subject heading in 2006, citing a 1998 New York Times article that said “’Queer theory’ is entering the literary mainstream.”[9] And in 2022, Amazon bans the use of the term in their reviews, even though they also produce the TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” People are angry—justifiably—that they cannot describe a book as “Queer Theory” even though they would be just as upset if the book were reviewed with a comment like “This book is for pinkos and queers.” It is hard to detect the context of the term usage, so instead we get outright bans on the term itself. And meanwhile, mainstream politicians have learned you can still get your hateful ideas out, just avoid certain terms, use neutral language, like blaming “inner-cities” like, ahem, we do not know what they are talking about. That is the art of the dog whistle. Not all hateful terms are exclusively hateful; hate speech does not have to have hateful terms.
The Terminology Problem
The bottom line on a word like “queer” and many others is that you cannot read the meaning of the word right off of its surface. If the concept is new to you, you might need to see some examples or have some explanation. But the word is also multivalent. A term’s rhetorical function changes in different contexts. It can be offensive; it can build comradeship; and can make social distinctions; and it can be used in various ways in everyday life. Context matters, explanation matters, shared understanding between the communicators matters, as does the opportunity to seek and receive explanation. And computers are really bad at those things, so when Amazon bans “queer” and the Internet filters forced upon libraries ban health information, we know that professional and responsible information services need to do better. Shame on Amazon. And you know a storm is about to hit us librarians on providing information or even mentioning the word “abortion.”
Which takes us back to the “terminology problem” that has become the focus of critical practice in librarianship. I agree that we should avoid biased terms like “illegal alien” in our work—it not only shows bias against a class of people, and there are equally meaningful and inclusive alternatives. But we should remember that every time we rule a term or phrase out of bounds, there is some segment of the population that might approach our systems with that term as the basis of their inquiry, and we just made things incrementally more difficult for them. That might even be desired in some circumstances. Do you want to turn away people who use the term “Queer theory”? Almost certainly not. “Illegal alien”? Maybe, but I would hope we would try to engage users rather than chastise when we can.
Understanding terms in context—or perhaps more accurately of misunderstanding terms denuded of their context—shows that our problems of meaning and educating users is never going to be about terms only. Getting terminology right requires broader understanding of language and its pragmatics—the social language skills we use in our interactions with others. Computational systems might not ever be able to determine appropriate uses of a term, but we can build computer-mediated systems (e.g. our catalogs) that provide deeper interactions amongst users and catalogers. I think this is the way Emily Drabinsky means in her use of the term in her excellent essay “Queering the Catalog.”[10]
“I Never Noticed That”
And there is one more meaning that I think shares some connotation with “queering” consistent with this sense of an open mesh of classifications. Viktor Shklovsky in a series of writings just over one hundred years ago said a function of art was to defamiliarize the ordinary and everyday, and make it strange, to bring it up over a threshold of routine perception. His term for this, in Art as Device (1917) is “ostranenie” which he describes as “creating the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing.”[11] The concept appears in many guises over the years, for example as a mode of aesthetic perception (versus instrumentalist modes of perception) and in Brecht’s concept of the “alienation effect” of art which moves the viewer into critical and investigatory modes of perception, perhaps asking questions like “why is this category like this?”
“Making strange” is at odds with much of our thinking about the control of names and subject terminology. Generally, we are guided to use the terms most commonly used. This supports the catalog as an efficient tool, and again we are prompted to save the time of the user. But what if we slowed down the process? Could we let people explore a person’s entry in the catalog, and not just simply speed past the naming ambiguities? What if subject categories and their names were presented as complex ideas, or grounds of investigation, rather than simply nomenclatures by which we tag and group documents? Let Google be that place where people look up things real fast, and move on. The catalog has a higher role–to be instructive–to not simply iterate common knowledge, but to expose it to scrutiny. We want our users to develop critical capacities. Reading is the best way to achieve that, but can we begin that work earlier in the process? The information literacy skills we promote ought to extend past assessments of the sources one reads, and also include assessments about what things are collected, and how they are made findable, or not.
Take as an example Women economists from the Library of Congress Subject Headings. It includes a reference to the now deprecated Women as economists. There is no equivalent Men economists, just Economists. How should we handle this dilemma? There are dozens of subject headings like this: engineers, executives, farmers, inventors, journalists, judges, jurors, etc. Are there no books on men in those roles, hence no need for subject headings? Should we get rid of the “women X” headings for marking out gender difference? I am not going to fault LCSH for seeking out a compromise that does not hide away books on women in those roles. Instead, I will fault us catalog librarians. I think the solution is to prompt users to ask “should we have subject headings that discuss men in the same roles?” or “Why are women marked out for special treatment this way?” Ultimately, the answer is in how we have constructed occupations and knowledge in this country, and less so about subject heading practice. Why do we designate some professions or social roles as gender-specific? By not having a Men nurses subject heading, we both naturalize certain concepts and hide away others. We ought to be making all of it a little strange, so that users can ask themselves those questions, and our systems ought to be designed in such a way so that we can begin to answer.
Ultimately, the real challenge is not whether to include words like “queer” or not. The challenge is to reveal the history and politics of certain words and categories in ways that support user exploration and learning. “Queer” might challenge us as to what words to the nature of our word choice, the socialness of our language, and the importance of context. But more importantly, queer theory challenges the “giveness” of categories and asks how they were constructed, and why. The problem is not the names we give things, but more deeply, the ways we have divided up and sorted the world, including how we define some jobs as masculine or feminine. The question is not whether we have “Women doctors” or not, but whether we can defamiliarize gender roles and occupations in such a way that users will slow down and consider how we create categories, relate topics to each other, and characterize books. Can we build a system that is open and explanatory, or do we want to simply keep replicating the conceptual categories of the past, with slightly updated labeling?
Works Cited
[1]MIT Press. https://twitter.com/mitpress/status/1542174568730841091and https://twitter.com/mitpress/status/1542174569678733317, posted June 29, 2022.
[2] Coles, Gregory. "The Exorcism of Language: Reclaimed Derogatory Terms and Their Limits." College English 78, no. 5 (2016), p. 434.
[3] Coles, p. 435.
[4] Zwicky, Arnold M. “Two Lavender Issues for Linguists.” Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Eds. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
[5] Coles, p. 434.
[6] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies.Duke University Press, 1993, p. 8.
[7] Halperin, D.M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 62
[8] Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory : An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996, p. 96-97.
[9]Library of Congress Subject Headings, Queer theory. LCCN: sh2006001835. https://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?AuthRecID=6788387&v1=1&HC=2&SEQ=20220722180222&PID=bRzfdQfOWOs5faK4xFNJLcsbO. Accessed July 22, 2022.
[10] Drabinski, Emily. "Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction." Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 94-111. doi: 10.1086/669547.
[11] Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device” in Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017, p. 80.