Quote of the Day

Hi! I have had a pretty full two or so weeks, what with life and work, and a document-management system that manages to not manage my (and others') documents all that well, so I've been pretty profoundly absent. That is sad for me, and I plan to correct it tout suite. Also, I have a post percolating in my head about militarism in the works of Joss Whedon, so hold onto your hats. Until then, QotD!

But language is a symptom, not the disease. Language is a product of thought, not the thought. Language is an act, not the motive underlying the act. Language is an effect of the structure, not the structure. And although language shapes thought, gives us the tools we have to understand the world and thus limits and informs what we can know – you can get all French-theory with me in the comment section – changing language isn’t going to take us anywhere unless we change the structure itself.

Via Sady. I love the post this quote came from, and I absolutely love the theory of language and the way words are used. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, and at some point my scanners at work will actually scan and separate documents, and I'll be able to think about something other than bar codes again.

Awesomeness

This is great. It is a marriage manifesto. Says Tom Ackerson,

"I no longer recognize marriage. It's a new thing I'm trying.

Turns out it's fun.

Yesterday I called a woman's spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, 'He's my husband.'

'Oh,' I say, 'I no longer recognize marriage.'"

I like this idea of not recognizing marriage. And I love anyone who sincerely uses the words "flip floppy". I'm thinking of joining in, partially to raise awareness of how much it would suck to have people not recognize the state of your relationship and partially to be obnoxious. It is also partially why I want to start referring to bunches of people "you gals" or "you girls" instead of "you guys". I have to admit that for all of my issues with gendered language, "you guys" doesn't bother me in the way that it should. Neither does "that takes balls" or "man up". These are things that pepper my every day conversation; but I kind of want to mix it up. Start referring to bunches of men as "girls" (my mouth doesn't sound right saying "gals", but maybe that is just another thing I should work on), and saying "that takes overies", and telling a guy or girl who need to just screw up some courage to "woman up". Partially because even though it doesn't offend me on a visceral level, it is still negating women and is still making men both the only recognized sex and the only positive one. And partially just to make the people around me screw up their faces and try to recognize what's happened. And hell, maybe I'll actually offend someone with my girlie rephrasing. And then we'll have a grand ole convo.

Final Fours and "Women's" Final Fours

On Saturday, I went to a UConn Women's Basketball game, because I love college basketball and I love women's college basketball more than men's, and because I love UConn's women's team probably more than any other team. It was a blow out, as can happen when one women's team is ranked #1 and the other team is unranked. But that gave me time to look at the banners adorning the XL Center. 
Pretty, aren't they? What struck me, though, was the difference in the emblems of the Men's winning banners and the Women's winning banners. Here are the two competing emblems from 2004, the year both the UConn Men's basketball team and Women's basketball team won the NCAA National Championship:

The Men's banner just says "NCAA Final Four"; the Women's banner explicitly says "NCAA Women's Final Four". This goes directly to what Habladora was saying in her Gender and Profession: Lady Doctors and Male Nurses post. Men are considered the norm when it comes to basketball players. Therefore, the banner doesn't have to explicitly say "Men", because when someone says "basketball player", we generally think of a man. In certain cases, like lady doctors and male nurses, I generally think we should leave gender out of the discussion, because it is a signifier of something out of the ordinary. It doesn't help change who we picture as doctors or nurses; it just modifies the automatic picture that appears at the mention of "doctor" or "nurse". For something like a Final Four appearance, though, I think we should take a different tactic. 

It is a competition, and two separate ones. For that reason, I would like for both the men's Final Four emblem and the women's Final Four emblem to indicate gender. Because right now, it seems as though the ungendered Final Four is the "real" Final Four, and the women's Final Four is an afterthought or less of a concern. And that is true; outside of Connecticut and Tennessee, many women's college basketball teams struggle to gain an audience; and women's teams in general can still suffer at schools like UConn and Tennessee, schools that have one outstanding women's program but whose other programs don't obtain that excellence year after year. Although I'm into language and words and how language and words shape our world and our lives, I wouldn't go so far as to say that making the gendered distinctions among Final Fours will suddenly revolutionize women's sports and make them as recognized and popular and respected as men's sports. But I do think it will help, even just a little bit, even just mostly subconsciously. Because even though it is a little thing, the little things add up; and although the wording on a sports championship banner is a very little thing, it is a representation of the gendered aspect in sports and other professions.