I believe that language shapes culture as much as culture shapes language, and that when we are at a loss for words to describe ourselves, we risk losing parts of ourselves. Surely they are lost in translation. Whether we know ourselves or not, does anyone else? How can we as queer people express identities like parenthood without defaulting to known heterosexist terms or to unfeeling neuters like ‘parent’? What do you call a parent who is neither Mom nor Dad? What is a parent who is neither Mom nor Dad? Call me crazy, but a kid calling me ‘Parent’ doesn’t have the same charm as ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’.
Language matters. Language matters way more than we as a whole give it credit. I’d like to talk about the language that surrounds us, and specifically that excludes us. Be it gendered language or plainly heterosexist, the message we receive is clear: Our very existence as queers inhabiting by choice or otherwise the space outside societal norms is contrary to nature. There are no words for us. Language is so deeply rooted in our psyche, our translation of the world around us, we forget that language is a cultural construct, and not a part of nature at all. The exciting realization of this leaves us at a precipice over the unknown, fresh with the potential for change and conscious culture.
I feel in my mother tongue, English, a cavity where the words for my people should be. I can’t imagine what it must be like for friends of mine whose first languages have no words for queer or even gender at all. How does one begin to explain, without being forced out of the spoken altogether? We can’t live our lives in dance, or wordless birdsong, hoping to be interpreted. If there’s one thing I’ve always loved about English (and I do love it dearly), it’s practicality. While it arguably lacks some of the spirit or lyric of other languages, there is a clarity available- a clarity quickly forgotten when it comes to us. Instead, we are, as I said, either neutered (spouse, parent, sibling), assigned a masculine or feminine gendered word despite ourselves (husband/wife, mother/father, brother/sister) or denied the recognizance of our interpersonal roles altogether, leaving a genuine expression of our lives to the realm of art and metaphor solely.
As beautiful as these fluid and creative expressions are, they are not enough for me. I like the stability and strength of language, the roots of parent tongues and branches of generational lingo. There is a beautiful thing that Harvey Fierstein says in one of my favourite films, “The Celluloid Closet” that has stayed close to my heart. In it he explains that “all the reading he was given to do in school was always heterosexual. I had to do this translation into my life rather than seeing it in my life. Which is why when people say to me it’s not really gay work, it’s universal. And I say, ‘up yours!’ It’s gay. That you can take it, and translate it for your own life is very nice, but at last, I don’t have to do the translating.” Mr. Fierstein is saying something quite important (as does the entire film) as he describes the ‘translation’ from ‘straight’ to ‘gay’, something that I’m trying to find the words to address more fully in my own life and society. Anyone who is queer understands this statement too deeply. The ‘translation’ is literal as well as experiential. The truth is, we’re translating from English, a heterosexist and (relatively) strictly gendered language into a language which doesn’t exist yet. The only way that language which is not oppressive because of how it is gendered, or focused on a sexuality or normative lifestyle (be it born of English or Italian or entirely new) exclusively is if we make it. We are the poets of our future and our children’s future.
Which brings me back to being a queer parent (hypothetically). The reason it is so exciting to realize that we need to make new language is simply that it means we have all the creative freedom. When my ex-fiance and I were talking longingly about parenthood, we started thinking of ungendered names for parental units. In my own life, I know I want something that wouldn’t sound like other words, something without connotations, something it’s own. Well our nicknames for each other are Bear and Deer, so we thought ‘Bur’ and ‘Der’ would be cute diminutives in places of Mommy and Daddy. Gender free and personal! The ideal is for words created in our own personal lives to be so excellent that they really catch on and effect the culture around us, but even in one’s own life, the effect queer language has on comfort, self-esteem and confidence is amazing. It really makes a difference, and like Harvey Fierstein says, at last it is normative society who must do the translating.
This applies to heterosexuals also. I had a conversation with a friend recently who is quite fascinating, though on the superficial fits into the white heterosexual male category. Well living in a Liberal community, he was finding himself disappointed with the neutering of everything. He missed the intimacy of the word wife, but the history of marriage and the word ‘husband’ itself were not cool with him. When heterosexual people are over the oppressive nature of language molded to empower only part of humanity, they too are faced with this creative challenge.
We are not the first generation of queers to get creative with their words. For a truly impressive example of queer creative language, one only need look to the history books. From the priests of Cybele, “said to converse with the palms of their hands turned upward, a gesture depicted on figurines portraying female deities, …to lisp, to giggle and whisper, to use obscene language, to employ women’s oaths, and to address each other in the feminine gender,” (Conner 1997) to the language Polari, which was very popular in Britain during the 1950s, we have found had a tongue itching to be explored. Polari was made predominantly of English slang inverted and modified slang of foreign languages coming in with new immigrants. Peter Burton wrote in Polari, only partly understood by the non-speaker,
“As feely homies, when we launched ourselves onto the gay scene, polari was all the rage. We would zhoosh our riahs, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we could stand around polarying with our sisters, varda the bona carts on the butch hom[m]e ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth. If we had enough bona measures, we might buy a handful of dubes to hoosh down our screechs – enabling us to get blocked out of our minds.” (1997)
One of my favourite examples of queer language in my own life came up between myself and a partner quite by accident. He is Italian and a wonderful cook (wonderful in many, many ways, actually). While talking about how we’d like to make lasagna for each other, and ‘taste each others lasagna’, being human/fancy apes, we couldn’t help but note the sexual subtexts of the sentence. ‘Let’s make lasagna together’ made a rather good code for sex if I do say so myself, better than ‘Studying’. (By the way, to people who say ‘we were studying’- you don’t have to wait until backed into a lingual corner before getting playful with language. Just sayin’.) Swiftly the phrase broke down into ‘lasagna’ as this beautifully multipurpose noun which could be placed in conversation to refer to just about anything sexual.
While I still wish for more specific language, the ambiguity of some created queer language excites me. Why not have a word which refers to sexual organs or sex? Why can’t my outtie be described by the same word as your innie? Language, though it shapes us, is something that we have conscious control over, despite normative society’s wishes that we would all forget that we have any conscious control over anything but our credit cards at all. After all, at the end of the day, we are human: creative, sexual, and designers and users of tools. Fancy apes.
Posted on May 9, 2011
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