There’s something inherently hilarious about taking one of those indie puzzle-platformers that’s intended to be a contemplative exploration of personal identity or mental illness or what have you and speed-running it.
The Game: Throughout this area, your repeated failures as you make incremental progress toward a symbolic goal will come to illustrate–
Well this sure is a handy new tool for visualizing Healthy Mental Practices. “You need to eat” won’t get me out of bed but “Clip through the floor to the coffeemaker and skip a boss fight” might!
when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize
you’re either going to build a base of clueless liberals who learn by rote to nitpick their language for anything with the remotest connection to ability, or you’re going to help them develop the alertness and critical eye necessary to recognize eugenics and abuse. i don’t think those things are mutually compatible in an immediate timeframe, because one locates both the root and branch of oppression in a disembodied cloud of language and thought, and the other locates it in the real material structures that we need to confront immediately in order to save actual lives. not saying “crazy” isn’t going to get anyone out of forced institutionalization
I think it goes deeper than that.
Every person who has ever threatened to institutionalize me has been totally able to use up-to-the-minute terminology for disability. Terminology that is way past my up-to-the-minuteness, and I’m a disabled person on disabled tumblr. And has not been shy about correcting me on the words I use for myself.
It’s a power thing. Neurotypical people, especially psych professionals, are just going to be better at navigating a maze of no-no words than most neurodivergent people, because it’s their job to be up to date. And they will absolutely use that skill difference as a tool to belittle, coerce, and institutionalize us.
And I’d broaden this to any social arena that has a lexicon of constantly changing no-no words. The people who have the time and inclination to learn this stuff and stay up-to-date on it are always going to be the people with more leisure time, more formal education, more spoons, etc. People with institutional power. People who are using “correct” language as a status game.
It’s hidden under the guise of being considerate or respectful (or expunging bias from language) but it’s often used as a cudgel to silence people with less institutional power, sometimes members of the very minority in question.
Ultimately it falls into the same problems we’re seeing with other forms of wokeness, where people are more concerned with the appearance of doing good things, while not actually following through on them.
I’ve had a lot of ableist language used against me on this hellsite. But some of the worst and I do mean worstand most harmful conversations I’ve had with people on here have come from people who know all the right words to say, and how to use them against me.
More times than I can count, people who have been arguing for my death because I cannot drink unaided without the use of a plastic straw (it’s literally the only safe material for me, I cannot use any others for reasons of health and disability. Please don’t ask me if I’ve tried X. I have. It doesn’t work.) have tried to make me look like the big bad evil because I called their argument “nuts”. And it works, I falter and admit my use of language was wrong, because it is. But then they use that to undermine everything else I say, questioning what my motives are and whether or not my reasons to not want to die are morally just.
Literal eugenicists are using woke language against the people they want to see removed from the planet for not being “pure” enough. And they know what they’re doing. They’re weaponizing language against us for a purpose, and that purpose is to appear morally superior so no one questions their other actions or motives. Just because someone talks nice and uses all the right words, doesn’t mean they’re not a vile, abusive asshole.
The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find, and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever.
- Jingo, Terry Pratchett
Something, something, “BBC America’s The Watch treats the source material like chefs cooking curious squid”
This is an inverse squid scenario, though: one where the public has asked for the squid, explained why it wants the squid, described the exact flavor it wants from the squid and only the squid, and the restaurant has nodded and presented a dish called “Curious Squid” which does not in fact contain squid, and may be laced with arsenic
