Whose Universe?
Sara and Liz at Comic Con NY 2011
One pet peeve of mine is the tendency of the world to infantilize, marginalize and denigrate women by calling them ‘girls.’ It’s a practice that’s slowly starting to retreat, at least in the US and Canada, in my experience, but one that is far from gone and twice as irksome for it. So, it was initially surprising and actually a bit upsetting to me that this new movement of geek ladies were self-selecting the moniker ‘girls.’
When I point this out I get a few responses from users of the name. First, and actually most common is basically: ‘Screw you we can call ourselves whatever we want!’ True! You can, and you should, but when you start calling me that –i.e. talking about all women geeks, not just young female geeks, then I get to have an opinion.
Second: ‘It’s been use to insult us, and so we are reclaiming it!’ Great! I always love reclaiming of once-negative terms; as a woman who identifies as not-heterosexual, I love the reclaimed use of the word ‘queer.’ But part of reclaiming is stopping people from using it in the negative sense, without knowledge, which I don’t see happening.
Third: ‘Geek guys call themselves geek boys or fan boys all the time! It’s the same. Geek culture is about celebrating play and childhood.’ This is a good point and I like the argument a lot, but I still have this niggling sense that terms like ‘fan boy’ is one that is reclaimed from when the larger culture minimalized geek culture by calling geeks children, essentially.
Look, language is important, we all know this. I hope that as these gender-conscious geek movements develop we can keep the nuances of the language we use in mind and keep our identifications of groups of people inclusive, rather than exclusive, even at the cost of some nifty alliteration.