So two items of note from yesterday's dyke police watch. They decided to lose their shit over a man on con panel who gave a shout out to a lesbian colleague's podcast: "Desperate Housedykes." 1/
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There were, I understand, other content problems with the panel. It's not my fandom and not my lane to speak to those. This thread is only about the dynamics around a man saying "dyke" as part of saying the title of a queer woman's podcast. 2/
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The angry dyke police keep making, in this situation and others, comparisons between the word dyke and the n word which I think is a really noteworthy tactic. By claiming that anyone other than (their narrowly defined category of) lesbians uttering the word dyke under ... 3/
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...ANY circumstance is analogous to non-Black people speaking the n word they are elevating "dyke" to a potency level of universal hate that it never had, and certainly doesn't universally retain today. 4/
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I would argue this move, and the rhetorical strategy of replacing dyke with "the d slur", enlists the power of structural racism and anti-racist activism in a completely inappropriate way against a word that has had a much less violent, much more mixed-bag history. 5/
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Why? That's my current question. Why take a word that the queer community has used creatively in a wide variety of activist and social ways since the 1970s and attempt to re-stigmatize it? 6/
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Yesterday's argument, that the word should be unspeakable, would make the creative work of many queer women difficult to promote, to recommend, to squee about, to share joyfully, to discuss in a class, or review comprehensibly. 7/
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When we use "dyke" we use it for a reason. While obviously people who are uncomfortable with the word can choose not to say it, I am deeply troubled by the way they are trying to make our chosen words unspeakable by others. 8/8
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As someone else pointed out, I would be immediately suspicious of anyone recommending the book "D-slurs to Watch Out For." I had no idea that people were outraged that he promoted a queer podcast without censoring the title.🙄
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It feels really creepy to me that people want to render queer women's work literally unspeakable ... while claiming it's being done to protect the "lesbian community". Obviously "dyke" can be used in cruel ways but this is robbing queer female artists of their voices.
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