How we speak and the language we use matters.
What are the subtle or transparent hegemonic themes you are enabling or engaging with when you chose to speak about a woman or man in a particular way?
What are the links to how you speak and how it is accepted or resisted?
Are you engaging with how that links to emotional, physical, sexual, financial and legislative abuse of another because of gender?
Where is your gender related behaviour motivated from? Love, fear, power or equality.Are you acknowledging the advantages you have because of where you are born, income, race, gender and belief system and what that enables in your life for no other reason than luck?Have you considered you live a privileged life because of those factors, that perhaps you do not see the huge inequities and power imbalances around you because you are protected from them?
Many aspects of language and everyday life have a latent gender bias. Stating this is not about blame but engaging with reality and deciding how we can act to address these inequalities from a place of acknowledgment and compassion.
These questions have been circulating around my brain: partly because I have been living in the developing world for nearly a year where gender disparities can be a little more blatant. But also because it feels that many do not engage with the intrinsic privilege that comes from the gender they are born into. It is an assumed privilege, one that is not earned on merit, but by genetic chance.
This privilege is real and blatant, and also, in the developed world, subtle and underhand in articulation. As determined by gender, we engage in very real and different sets of expectations which affect access, power, agency and life quality.
This is illustrated through victim blaming, legislation, language that is gender assigned and has stronger negative connotations because of it, through how one can express one’s power or maturity, the standards you are expected to meet, your value in the market place ( Gender pay gaps are again increasing across the developed world – and up to 48 percent in Australia if you work in the health and community services sector) and influences expectations around appearance, career, how you behave, expressions of sexuality etc. Gender affects every aspect of existence.
And let’s be real here, the issue isn’t gender, its women.
Women DO Not have real equality anywhere on this planet. Some places may be better than others but a true equality does not exist when by being born female you are engaged with from a hegemonic “women and other minorities” framework. Where our bodies are legislated against so we are unable by law to make decisions that affect every aspect our lives without it potentially being a criminal act. Where women who are successful are systematically targeted by the main stream media and their femaleness is targeted rather than their actions.
All of these things are connected to language, how power structures developed and predominantly male run speak, how men and women talk about each other, how dialogue around gender issues occurs and what the reaction points are.
Consider your language around gender – it is important – and is indicative of power and respect, love and fear. How you speak is how you think and that is indicative of everything when it comes to how your gender plays out in the world and how you live because of it.
The Storyteller Project 