here's it in a nutshell. if i'm in a room with mac, and she says, "i'm a dyke! my friends and colleagues have decided that we're reclaiming the word "dyke"."
and i say, "well, good for you, dyke."
when/if she then takes offense at that, that's bullshit. sure, she can say i'm a anti-gay bigot, an asshole... whatever, but that calls into play the artificial notion that it's a lesbian word only, as if you have to say the password to get it out from behind glass. because you, of course, use it responsibly and without malice.
All I, and I think Shweta and MacAllister, have been asserting is:
• That words have meaning in context, and that that meaning changes with time, place and person.
• That dyke coming from someone with some respect and regard for the individual in question, versus dyke coming from someone who intends it as hurtful
connote different things.
i am contending that once you have put the word back into play, it's the same four letters and pronunciation no matter whose mouth it comes out of (or where that mouth has been).
Here's where
I call bullshit.
You and I both know that an otherwise objectionable word--say bastard--has different connotations determined by the person using it, and the circumstances.
Bastard can be a term of respect--even affection.
"He's a surly old bastard, but he's right"
Or
"He's a bastard and ought to be drawn and quartered."
Or
"You clever bastard you!"
But for man to call another man a bastard in, say, the 1800s, was so offensive that men killed other men for merely asserting that one was a bastard. Language changes. We're right on the cusp of language change for words like gay, queer, and dyke, and a host of others.
Look at how geek has changed in connotation in the last ten years. Geek is almost a status word now, and more likely to be used as a level descriptor, without negative connotation ("My girlfriend is a total geek; she got the router up in less than five minutes!".
Geek used to refer to a person in a carnival side-show who bit the heads off of live birds.
even if you could divine in any precise way the level of bigotry or malice with which it's wielded (and i submit that it falls on an extensive spectrum), you still have no intrinsic right to decide who and who cannot use it.
in summation, in my view the basic assumptions (indeed the truncated listing) of this thread—"privileged language"—is bullshit. you don't get to pick and choose words that can personally define depending on who is saying them.
Sure you do; MacAllister, or you, or I, get to choose what we will tolerate and won't tolerate from those who refer to us directly. I can choose to accept darling from one person, but not another; that's part of why people use terms like "Sweetie" to address each other; it can be both an endearment, and affectionate, and an insult, and meant to be demeaning, depending on the context and the persons.
Babe from you, even in terms of an acerbic response, is not insulting to me; I get what you're doing. You get what I'm doing with dude, too.
water is always water, and a dyke is always a dyke.
Again, no, you're wrong.
There's a distinction between dyke/Dyke the way mainstream culture uses it, even in non-pejorative contexts, and the way dyke/Dyke is used within lesbian subculture. You can see that distinction very very clearly, in text, and in conversation. It's there in the citations I posted earlier in this thread, and it has a history that predates Stonewall.
But that's
within lesbian subculture. Dyke/dyke is perceived differently outside the subculture, and it's changing there.
