bmichael replied to your link: Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity
If you look into ableist discourse, well, you will find that under the many overlapping (sometimes at-odds) ways of thinking about it, you can’t in fact say anything. It’s like anti-anti-early-Wittgenstein.you know what, i’m pretty sick of thinking about this ableist language issue as a fun linguistic and semantic thought exercise. i care about it because the ableist stereotypes and stigma that are reinforced and strengthened by ableist language have cost me jobs, relationships, and two weeks of freedom from being involuntarily institutionalized. this is not abstract for me - this is experience with the world and people in it viewing me and interacting with me through a framework and lens that emphasizes the instability and need to marginalize and discount people with mental illness - a framework that is shored up and reinforced by the casual ableist language that people are telling me i’m being oversensitive for caring about.
I just don’t think a close reading of four words worth of something is very well indicative of what it’s supposed to mean. And by clutching those four words—one word, really—that it does become a semantic exercise because it doesn’t get to its substance. I think Monica’s point about the title of the rally undercutting the actual grievances the rally is about—by citing a pathological rather than I what’s the opposite vocational behavior—is really insightful and great.
And for the over a quarter of the population that includes perhaps not me but lots of people I know and love, I’m sure it’s a personal issue that I should transitively also be incensed about. I’m certainly not trying to tell you or anyone else to shut up or do anything else, and in fact, I liked your post and the person’s (kohnaeri? I can’t spell his handle) response to your post, and I’m not especially proud of my response to your initial post or my response to his response to your post.
It just seems to me that when language is at odds with reality, and it’s the language that’s being critiqued, that it is in that specific case a semantic type of examination. Words are clearly powerful. Would I be upset if the ill-said sentiment were ill-said in a way that personally offended me. Well, that’s question begging—of course. Am I upset with people who write about ableist language—do I think that what they’re doing is unworthy of pursuit? Not at all. I don’t know. I think there’re a lot of battle lines drawn around Stewart and what he’s all about, which is great because even though he seems to have a solid career doing things I like, it’s important to keep desedimenting and pushing for a better understanding of things. I’m of two minds about it because I do agree with you, but I also disagree with the specificities of it.
