More on language and triggering

It seems as though every few days another article on the language of the social justice sphere, who "owns" which words and who gets to reclaim them, makes the rounds of the SJ blog world with predictably polarizing results. Jack Halberstam's "You are Triggering Me: The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma" is the latest and actually one of the more nuanced I've read while still neglecting to acknowledge that language changes and adapts over generations. Where a lot of these articles fall short is trying to apply today's politics to the activists of the 80s and 90s, and many of them were activists in the 80s and 90s climbing a decidedly steeper hill. That's still no reason to dismiss issues of language within the LGBT community as whining.

To be honest, I agree with him more than I don't. I was thumbing through an old Ellen Willis essay yesterday criticizing the hierarchy of oppression common in the social justice world today, so it's hardly a new issue, but I think were a lot of these articles fail is trying to apply the politics of today to the activism of the 80s and 90s. I'm closer to Halberstam's age than I am the average Tumblr activist, I understand that world. Whenever I write a new post or comment, I think of every possibly way someone could misinterpret or deconstruct it. I think context matters, or, at least, I don't think context should be ignored entirely, passed over in favor of a very dogmatic approach to "rightness" and "wrongness" or "correctness."