#SO untethered from the original concerns abt pathologization

[aeide-thea]

[psychiatric/pathologizing terminology, holocaust imagery, slurs, in-group/reclamatory deployments of]

i've seen people complain in the past that the term 'paranoid reading' is ableist, and i thought, μέν i'm always open to refining the framings i use for things, δέ maybe i should, you know, actually go look at the sedgwick before formulating an opinion—only it turns out 4 in the morning is not, shocker, actually the best time to be trying to wrap yr head around anything complex? however at first glance it does seem worth noting that whatever one's stance on psychiatric-flavored terminology, the original essay is not in fact deploying it accidentally or, i'd argue, wholly appropriatively—it's very explicitly connecting the label to its history of use against queer people to pathologize queerness. so my initial instinct here is that while i do still see why the term might make people flinch, it does seem like sedgwick's deployment of it was deliberate, informed, and in a certain sense reclamatory. doesn't mean it's therefore invalid to flinch at it! but does make flinching at it fairly analogous to flinching at deliberate, informed, reclamatory deployments of the pink triangle, or of language like queer, fag, dyke, etc—id est, something it's valid to want to avoid, if it triggers you, but not in fact categorically inappropriate.

it obviously gets more complicated as we move away from 'queer [still at the time of writing literally pathologized in the DSM!] theorist discussing/attempting to practice antihomophobic theorizing' towards 'people of unspecified positionality applying sedgwick's concepts to arenas farther afield from either queerness or pathologization,' and i do really want to be mindful here of how comparatively little i've personally been subject to this sort of involuntary pathologizing labeling and how that positions me vis-à-vis this discourse, and also of hierarchies of psychiatric pathologization more broadly, but. my initial sense (while still not, to be clear, having fully digested or even finished reading the sedgwick piece!) is that the action item wrt this particular language is less 'strike it from our lexica' and more 'be mindful of its potential to twist in our hands and cut people, and use it with the respect any knife is due, and with attention to our safety circle.'

which is really, i think, the answer more often than not: we often seem to want things to be an automatic, no-thought-required yes/no, when in fact there's very little that has no potential for harm and requires no thought, and also very little that ought to be categorically off limits. most things are situational, really, and deserve more active (re)examination than they often get; but we do so love our thin-slicing!

#lol this is. so long and so unnecessary #however. it's still dark out. coherence and concision are daylight goals #(this stuff sucks bc like. there really are very genuine competing needs here and that's always hard!) #(would be easy to say 'no one ever gets to use language that's been used to hurt people' but like. #for SO many reasons that can't actually be the answer.) #(but like. as often i think the problem here isn't actually this language— #it's when people use it who don't give a shit abt pathologized people #and even then the problem isn't primarily that the language usage itself is appropriative or ableist‚ so much as that it's like #SO untethered from the original concerns abt pathologization #that it's like. oh i see: the only way that issue is making it into the room is as a spectre of itself harnessed to describe other concerns #these tags are becoming as much a mess as the post itself but i just do think a lot abt like. things people want to label Inherently Bad #and how often it's like. less that they're actually Inherently Bad and more that they point up the badness of something adjacent #and press on the bruise of that #if that makes any sense! it's of course splitting hairs but we love that around here. aspiration: machined levels of precision.