An interesting post caught my attention today on Feministing as I made my morning blog rounds. It involved Hillary Clinton's statement that she was the country's "girl" when speaking during a Democratic debate a couple of weeks ago. Cara on feministing was bothered by Clinton's use of the word "girl" because to her it represented the "cultural phenomenon of infantilizing women." Cara went on to hypothesize why Clinton would have used the term in the first place, but I'd like to get at something a little deeper.
The debate of language reminded me of an article I read last fall titled "Feeling Foreign in Feminism" by Maivan Clech Lam, on her experiences with white bougie feminism in the States (she's originally from Thailand). In her essay, Lam takes us through several stories of her own, all of which include some form of scolding or condescension by white American feminists on her customs, use of language, or rationale for decisions. These statements often ended with her being told that she was not being an appropriate feminist. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on one story in particular, about her son and his girlfriend.
Her son, being 21 at the time, began dating a woman who was 24 and had a baby. She was surprised to hear this, and applauded her son's more progressive sense of relationships. However, when she referred to his girlfriend as a woman, an interesting exchange began.
"She's not a woman, mom, she's only a girl," he replied. I responded with something about how an adult female, particularly one with a child, is a woman. He in return made it very clear that he could not think of her as a woman, that his age set of "guys" simply dated "girls." I relented and referred to her as a girl, which allowed our conversation about her, and him, to continue."
Lam, then feeling proud of her son's expressed interest in not only an older woman, but one with a child, and the responsibility he wanted to share in that, relayed the new relationship to one of her friends, who also happened to be a white feminist. Upon hearing that he was referring to her as a "girl," the woman, who had known Lam's son for a long time, demanded that Lam go back and tell her son that he absolutely could not refer to his new partner as a "girl" and that Lam could not refer to her as such herself, because it did not "square" with the rest of her politics. When Lam pointed out the progressive attititude of her son's newfound interest, her friend dismissed it. All that mattered in the moment was that highly imflammatory word "girl."
Lam goes on to talk about the magic and technology of words, and how American feminists cling to those notions of them, which "stress the automatic, the uniform, the unidimensional, the unidirectional, the unicausal-in a word, inflexible." In essence, she says that our understandings of language in American feminism need to be more complex and less concrete. That we are taking up a lot of time tip-toeing around buzz words, thinking that if we say them, that the movement will crumble, or that by not saying them we become more "authentic" feminists. I think sometimes we get so caught up in linguistics, that we become blind to situational nuances. This is not to say that a distinction between "girl" and "woman" is at times very appropriate, but we must always be cognisant of the context. In Hillary's case, I think it was a very calculated mix - a throwback to her days in the South, an attempt at talking with people, not at them, and of plain ol' being catchy. If we uphold the importance of language, then it becomes dire that we pay attention to how it is being used - when we have our first good shot at a woman President, who has proven that she's very much willing to push accepted notions for what her gender is and is not capable of, then maybe we should give her a little bit of credit for knowing how to use her words - carefully and with a clear purpose.
