User:Queenfeline/WhatWillBeDone

What will be done eventually definitely soon hopefully
see Project – see Thesis

I like thinking about words and what they actually mean.

This obsession already started during my bachelor in a course lead by Oswald Egger, a german author, where we took texts apart and talked about words and what they mean for hours. Later he was my bachelor project adviser, as I made a book filled with texts where I played with the german language. I took words literally and thus elicited a meaning that is inherently in them but deviates from linguistic usage. I really enjoy finding those differences myself, thus my urge to help other people see them as well.

Starting XPUB we created a class-glossary. We called ours Alphabet Soup. Here Lidia introduced us to pay attention that we, as a class, can have different understandings of words, as we all have different (cultural) backgrounds. So it is important to speak about the concepts and understandings that we have connected to certain words, as they might not be the same for everyone. This and the experimental glossary writing sessions really fascinated me. I like that we are free to give words our own XPUB meaning, that we as a class agreed on.

This heavily inspired me to start my own glossary. I refused to call it dictionary as this has a man-made and dictating connotation for me, so that I called it Idioticon which means 'a reference book listing alphabetically terms or names important to a particular subject or activity along with discussion of their meanings and applications.' which sounds way more fitting for what I was, and still am, doing. Here i collected words and concepts that I encountered over the year. I researched meaning and added my own thought. What felt like a fun little side project actually turned into the thing that I spent a lot of time with.

During the Special Issues this interest never really made it into the projects and always stayed something I additionally did on the side. During SI 26 I had a lot of fun with the email subjects that I collected and made a little booklet out of. During SI 27 I thought a lot about the concept of time and how that word and concept as we know it today only exists rather recent as ancient societies had other standards of measuring what we, now, can compare to time. So I'm so looking forward to actually making a project that makes words the subject of the discussion.

A side from all that feminism plays a big part in my life. As a woman I constantly experience sexism in this world which acts as a big motivator to research it, try to understand it and find ways to fight it. Recently it became clear to me that sexism is so intertwined with society and behavior/speech patters that I, as a woman, behave and speak in ways that are sexist and therefor oppress women. So as I speak I oppress myself. This realization left me feeling icky to my core and alienated from language. Sexism feels so inescapable. It hides in every corner and behind every word we say. It's costume is so concealing I didn't even noticed it myself. To me all this shows so clearly that we need to talk about the hidden sexism in language more. We need to become more aware of the things we actually reinforce when speaking patriarchal language. We must check our language to uncover if it conveys what we believe. We need to expose the sexism in our socially trained and inherited language and adjust our speech behavior to match our convictions.

Therefore I want to host group meetings where we collectively try to discover all the meanings a word carries and check them on sexism. I'm very aware that speaking habits are closely connected to ones identity and that these words can be triggering. Uncomfortable feelings will arise, but I think they should not stop us from speaking about this topic. Because the same argument also speaks in favor of this, the connection of speaking habits and identity makes the sexism has (negative) effects on our self-perception.