Justice for Who? — Finding a Language of Liberation (Part 1)
Language is a marvellous, and marvellously complex, creation. It shapes the world we live in, constructing opinion and perspective, revealing and erasing and framing our past and present. While a picture may speak a thousand words, words are still the default when it comes to describing what we see and communicating what we know. Although it is often cited that only 7% of communication is verbal, the reality is a lot more complex, with language undoubtedly shaping the way we understand and interact with the world around us. If you need proof, think about the last great speech or performance you heard. Sure, the speakers demeanour, body language, tone and action undoubtedly played a large part in making it great but what do you remember about it? Do you remember the gesture she made at 3 minutes in or do you remember that key quote repeated as a motif throughout? Do you remember the exact mise-en-scene of a shot in your favourite movie or do you remember the lines spoken by the actors? Language is powerful and it has staying power meaning that the words we use to characterise or describe something can come to define what we are talking about. For this reason, paying attention to what we say is critical, particularly in today’s digital age where more and more information is consumed online and often in text form.
Language fascinates me and for the past few years I have been on a quest to attempt to develop a language of liberation. What I mean by this is that I regularly scour my vocabulary, teasing apart the words and phrases that I use in order to reveal the hidden oppressive structures buried at their hearts and then reforming them into non-oppressive, liberated prose. It’s an ongoing, imperfect work in progress which I expect to be working on my whole life but each new discovery helps me deconstruct the ways in which my brain has been shaped by oppressive structures and carve out new pathways which challenge our current society. In this series I plan to share some of the changes that I have made to my language and the linguistic choices that I have made in the hopes that others will find it helpful in their own journey towards building a liberated language and a liberated world.
This week I will be tackling the amorphous term animal, detailing the evolution my language has gone through whilst attempting to discover a word that aptly refers to animals oppressed by humans.
A is for Animal
For a long time I have been part of the, often circuitous discussion about what is the right way to refer to animals who are not of the species homo-sapien. Like many animal justice advocates, I quickly rejected the term animal because, as is often stated, humans are animals too, so to refer to non-human animals as animals but not include humans in this category is to deny humans their animality and, therefore, to buy into the same kind of human exceptionalism that leads to speciesism in the first place. With this baseline understanding I entered into the murky realm of ‘other animals’ and ‘non-human animals’ a dual usage that has defined the way I speak about animals exploited by humans for the past two years. Lately though I started to challenge this use of language leading me to ultimately decide to retire both from my vocabulary. In the case of ‘other animals’ this was primarily a simple matter of clarity. While its common use within animal justice circles almost assures understanding when it is spoken, outside of these circles it quickly becomes confusing. Without any reference points, ‘other’ becomes meaningless, rendering the term ‘other animals’ entirely useless as it could refer to any animal at all depending on who is characterised by ‘other.’ After all, if we place chipmunks at the centre of our discussion, humans become other animals. As for ‘non-human animals,’ while technically accurate to refer to those animals discussed in animal justice spaces, this term is often justly criticised for its centring of humans and for its problematic way of characterising all other species by their relationship to homo sapien. In this way, ‘non-human animals’ falls into the same trap as the original term ‘animals,’ that we were trying to avoid, by reinforcing human exceptionalism and othering all other animals.
So what term should we use? For me, I have been guided by the works of writers such as Aph and Syl Ko and Sunaura Taylor who encourage a view of oppression that sees subjugation tied not to biological categories but to political ones. This view has been used to reframe whiteness as referring to a political status rather than a skin colour and has also been applied to the concept of ‘animal’ to explain how animalisation acts as a political tool used to justify the marginalisation of certain groups including farmed animals and some humans (e.g. people of colour and people with disabilities). For this reason, I have decided to return to using the word animal to describe animals oppressed by humans, but to differentiate this political definition of the word from the biological one through the addition of a capital A at the beginning. In conversation, this can be communicated by making a triangle shape with your thumbs and pointer fingers to indicate a capital A or by simply saying ‘capital A Animal’ if visual cues are unable to be used. My reasoning for this choice is to centre Animals as a politically categorised group who have been deemed marginal by the dominant group (white, cis, able-bodied, heterosexual humans). While other groups who are animalised may reject the use of the term Animal to describe them and this term should only be used to refer to animals of species other than human at this stage, by reframing Animal as a political category we can deconstruct the notion that speciesism is, at its heart based inherently on species. It is not the fact that a pig is a pig that makes a human kill them, it is the fact that humans have deemed pigs second-class citizens. By making this simple change to our language we can begin to move beyond biological categories, a process which can and will significantly shift the language and tone of liberation towards systemic not individual change. After all, biological prejudice is based in our brains but political prejudice is based in a system; and the system can change.
Thank you and I hope you keep reading!
Harley
