leah lakshmi piepzna-samarisinha is one of the most annoying writers I've ever read. i read 40 pages of care work and could not keep going, and every time i read one of their essays in an anthology, it's a little bit painful. more than my mere annoyance though, i think a lot of their writing demonstrates the ways that language associated with marginalization become symbolic of pretend social awareness rather than knowledge. fascinatingly enough, the only time I've ever found their work compelling is when they were talking about their mother, someone who they (mostly) could not overuse under-defined leftist buzzwords to describe.
largely, their descriptions about their mother were actual descriptions: scenes, behaviors, and when words were repeated, like "smart" and "ugly," their social connotations were investigated. identity labels were not treated as easily regurgitated, repetitive, stable adjectives--they meant something.
many leftists have a tendency to do this, but it is extremely present in their writing: putting autistic, brown, femme, BIPOC, queer neuroweird, whatever in front of a noun doesn't make them relevant to it or true. what the hell is autistic silence? autistic family, autistic revolution, autistic needs? terms seemingly self explanatory, despite the purpose of engaging with this language at all is to acknowledge that nothing about your being is self explanatory.
"autistic silence," for example, could describe nonspeaking, parallel play that doesn't feature talking, quiet stimming behaviors, a need for quiet related to sensory issues. who knows, though, what it actually means because it is just said and then left alone.
leftists use these words like children who have just learned words like "therefore" and "however." they are everywhere, overused, deprived of meaning where we're supposed to pretend that their use makes sense. with children though, it's sweet, and it's a sign of excitement and growth, new neural pathways forming. in adults with platforms and careers, it's an example of inattention to history and context. in left spaces, it's an opposition to words' meanings that people pretend is a radical defiance that is actually a failing to be critical, accessible to people of multiple educational levels, and intentional about the language they're using.
piepzna-samarisinha writes and chronically misuses terms through phrases like "cis-femmes" and "intersectional people," failing to consider? or perhaps has considered but simply refuses to say? that a cis-femme is just a (cis) woman. and every person is intersectional, even cishet white men--because intersectionality isn't an identity, it's a framework to analyze the way that people's lives are affected by systems. (something does feel... relevant here about the way the term "intersectionality," coined by a black woman (kimberlé crenshaw) has started to just mean 'person of color' plus 'something else marginalized' to a lot of people.) not everyone who is feminine is a femme. their non-lesbian mother is not a femme. femme is a gender identity rooted in lesbian history, not a shorthand for feminine that is radical because queers use it.
this misuse also leads to the misinforming of others on language related to disability, such as "hyperfocus." they've associated it with autism, when it is only to be solidly considered to be associated with ADHD. failing to explain this language also leads to the now-common assumption that "hyperfocus" just means "really focused" instead of being, while for some, enjoyable, also debiltating, leading to hours of fulfilling task completion, but also total neglect of needs like drinking water and using the bathroom.
how close are we to overusing the meaning out of this language, glomming onto it because it seems to feel right to the self without ever even knowing the meaning or acknowledging the history of meaning before, and who it affects now?
origamiaround
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
jacobvanloon
dededos
