The Words have Escaped the Asylum

Or entered it. Either way it's our job to deal with it.

When I was in graduate school for a Master’s in Literature, I studied theory almost exclusively. This was new to me, for as an undergrad at the University of California at Davis during the late 1990s, we were still talking about things like metaphor and authorial intent. I took an entire class on Shakespeare’s “bawdy.”

Rather quaint, really.

I had professors who could recite Chaucer from memory. My favorite Shakespeare professor used to reserve a back room at a local brewery once a week, and if we showed up and recited the Bard from memory, he’d buy us beer. Well, if we were 21 years old. We read Dante, Faulkner, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, who we also read in grad school, but for entirely different reasons.

In other words, I had what one may call a “traditional” literature education. We spoke little of feminism, and nothing of the white cishetero patriarchy, although we studied racism, Jim Crow, and women’s liberation. If you asked me what “othering” was, I would have taken a long drag of my clove cigarette and shrugged ironically.

You can imagine the explosion in my innocent little brain when I began grad school in 2007 and my whole world became theory. This is partly the result of the normal difference in focus between undergraduate and graduate education: Grad students delve deeper into theory. But the focus of my undergraduate education, even in an extremely liberal California town, was largely a result of the era. As in, the theories I studied in grad school — queer, feminist, critical race, Marxist, postcolonial, etc. — had not yet made their way into undergraduate education. If my professor friends are telling the truth, this is no longer the case.

This was a pretty effective way to learn, actually, because when I got to grad school I had four years of experience with the very canon we were now deconstructing.

I’ll be frank: These theories blew open my brain and solidified my politics. After a relatively conservative upbringing involving Mormonism, rural California, learning to shoot guns at age 8, and a Dad with a full-size Clint Eastwood cardboard stand-up doll, I was not particularly accustomed to the ideas my grad-school professors offered.

My upbringing was not as simple, however, as these anecdotes may suggest. I was raised rather poor by a single mother, and while we attended the Mormon church, my mom was something of a maverick. She was married to a non-Mormon, and all three of my parents (Dad, Mom, Stepmother) took me to concerts – Bob Dylan, Santana, the Dead. Not exactly standard Mormon behavior.

But again, I grew up in what would probably be categorized as lower middle class with some dabbling in the working poor. Not middle, that’s for sure. My family never owned a house, and we moved at least a dozen times by the time I was 14. I understand now that this is “housing insecurity.” I thought it was normal to leave rentals every 3-6 months for no discernable reason.

While I was never hungry, we had powdered milk and toothpaste delivered to us by Deseret Industries, the community aid nonprofit of the Mormon church. I believe I went to the dentist once. I experienced questionable “childcare” that was a direct result of not being able to afford safer options. We struggled to cover basic expenses. Our minivan had a duct-taped window and spewed black smoke. Sometimes my paternal grandmother would take me to Wet Seal to buy three new outfits for school, and this was the fanciest moment of my life.

Things changed after middle school. We moved from Central to Northern California, where I attended a Catholic girls’ school on partial scholarship, and my incredible mother worked in the lunch room to reduce my tuition further. I had moved in with my dad and stepmother, who were decidedly better off, so I had a nice little car to drive, lived in a tree-filled neighborhood, and attended private school. Sure, I had two jobs, but also a gym membership, and all my friends were rich. I could almost pretend I came from one of those winery families.

This is no sob story and I do not intend to frame it as such. I was in no way destitute. I would have never faced homelessness.

My point here is that I did not have a life that encouraged particularly rigid ideas about our country and I did not grow up in a uniformly comfortable bubble. I parroted the patriotism of my parents, but the moment I was presented with an alternative to that “best country on earth/we are very free/please ignore the meth addicts dying in the streets” narrative, I saw my own experience reflected back to me.

I had experienced firsthand the country where a single mother could not find stable housing or access sufficient healthcare. I knew the relief I felt when my mom finally got health insurance because Obama removed the preexisting conditions restrictions, so the whiplash she got from a car accident back in the 1980s no longer jacked up her premium past what she could afford. I remember where I was standing when she told me that news (by the photocopy machine at the office where I was a receptionist).

I remember how a very old, deep worry for my favorite person on earth seemed to lift out of my body. Finally, finally my mom will have health insurance. I knew the country that left families with little to no healthcare so corporations could make more billions.

When I learned of the inequality of this country, of the top 1% controlling 40% of the economy, of the neoliberal order rooted in whiteness, racism, exploitation of the working classes — well, I understood it. I had experienced part of it, and saw how I benefited from other parts of it.

Even more transformative was that I felt I had been sold a lie. I had been given a false story of my own country, one of bootstraps, equality, and the “American dream.”

But now, here in this classroom discussing all these new ideas, I had the Truth. (It had not yet occurred to me that these people also told me there is no Truth but I digress.)

This is a particularly exciting moment in a young person’s life. If you haven’t experienced it, it feels like being let in on an edgy, forbidden secret. I know things I’m not supposed to know. There’s a certain wildness to buying Marx at the school bookstore and reading it.

As you may have guessed, I was most interested in Marxist theory. But I also inhaled gender, critical race, and postcolonial theories. I read Said, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Halbersam, hooks, Lacan, and Benjamin. Among many others. I wrote, studied them all, and taught writing to undergrads through four modules: gender, labor, race, power.

Writing. That’s how I taught writing. As in, first-year composition courses. Okay, moving on.

It wasn’t until I moved to The Netherlands that many of the ideas I formed in grad school were directly challenged, reshaped, given some context and nuance. I wrote about that here if you’re curious.

My point now, however, is to say the following: I understood in graduate school that we studied obscure theorists and their radical, complex ideas to push back on mainstream narratives of the world, to see things in a new way. It was to complicate neat framings of why society is as it is, teach us to think more critically, and interrogate that which is portrayed as inalienable cultural fact. We were challenging the stories written by the victors of history.

I did not think concepts like “all truth claims are socially constructed” or “human interactions should be understood as negotiations of power” – or, you know, Judith Butler’s entire canon – were offering literal instructions for organizing society. I understood them as analytical frameworks, lenses to examine literature and the world through different angles, not as blueprints for existence.

For example, contemplating the nature of truth and cultural relativism pushed back on what came before: That there is one single Truth, western cultures have it, and everyone else should learn it so they, too, can be civilized. It complicated ethnocentrism and asked us to understand other cultures within their own contexts rather than blanketing them with ours and judging accordingly.

It did not mean, for example, that female genital mutilation cannot be critiqued as a harmful practice because we aren’t part of that culture and therefore we must accept it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Much of what we studied, of course, applied directly to “real life.” Questions of privilege, class dynamics, and gender inequalities.

For example, studying the history of redlining and white flight reframed and deepened my understanding of how American “ghettos” were formed, how our society ended up segregated, even today, with white folks largely in the suburbs and people of color in more urban areas. This of course pushes hard against narratives of laziness, of poverty as a matter of not trying hard enough. As a Gen X kid, I grew up with deep devotion to bootstraps. Complicating that “American dream” story allowed me to understand the country better, and question for whom these stories were actually true.

In short, grad school helped extricate me from powerful narratives I had uncritically adopted through a process of cultural osmosis.

Perhaps it was my mistake to believe we weren’t supposed to apply all of these theories directly to our lives, but no professor ever asked us, for example, to envision a society organized around postmodernism’s most fundamental implications. We studied Foucault’s arguments about the relationship between power and knowledge, and Derrida’s critiques of language and meaning, and these ideas taught us to interrogate assumptions long treated as neutral or obvious.

We learned to ask: “Who benefits from this truth? Who is harmed? Who is left out? Which assumptions exist that reflect a particular space and time?”

But we stopped there. We did not discuss what may happen if these ideas truly formed the basis for our analyses, or even if they formed the primary basis. If we cannot reach a “neutral” truth due to the inherent fallibility and subjectivity of the person making the claim, how do we determine if one truth is more accurate than another?

If we are not using material reality as the measure of a claim’s validity (e.g. Is there evidence of this? Does reality reflect this?), what exactly do we use? How do we create a common understanding of what’s true?

If our understanding of truth is always shaped by subjective social power, how do we defend science, the law, or any shared reality at all? I mean, on some level, don’t we need to agree that there is some truth “out there” to study and find?

And would the ultimate extension of Foucault’s assertions likely be a shift from the material world to the social positions of those making truth claims? Would it not make sense that we spend our time analyzing the social position and identity of the speaker rather than the quality of the claim itself?

And do we not see evidence of this happening now?

We played, we dreamed, we tossed these theories around endlessly, our brains lit up with the potential of it all.

But we never asked: Does this actually work?

***

Imagine my surprise when all that forbidden knowledge began popping up everywhere, all wily-nily in the mainstream. Cultural appropriation, whiteness, intersectionality, gender as performance, systemic racism, etc. — everywhere!

First of all: Rude. I was having a hard enough time being a radical marxist in my minivan with Starbucks and four kids, but to hijack our sacred subversive secrets? Back off, Teen Vogue.

Second, part of what made these ideas so transformative and powerful was precisely that they subverted that which “they” were all saying. And yet it was stolen by these hegemonic institutions? (Ah, hegemonic. A word I used at least four times a week and 7-9 times in every essay.)

Yes, the words were everywhere, and still are, but certainly not as I learned them. The versions floating around the mainstream are deeply oversimplified, one-dimensional, and largely stripped of context. Some have strayed so far from their origins they now signify the opposite of what they originally meant.

This should not have surprised me. For again, we never discussed implications for society of literal application (thus we were not “warned,” so to speak, of potential drawbacks), and beneath every classroom discussion was the understanding that we were trying to improve a deeply broken world. A vein of activism pulsed through every literary deconstruction. It was all a social project, for what is the point of critiquing a nation ad nauseum if not to improve it?

It should also not be surprising that the most superficial versions of these ideas would be what flourished in the mainstream. Nuance is difficult to sell, confuses algorithms, and generally involves more words than Twitter allows, or once allowed. We all know this, right?

The problem is that now we’re stuck with this bullshit.

Now that I’m 47 and a Republican — JUST KIDDING — thirteen years out of grad school, I can safely argue that this is our fault and it’s our job to deal with it. We let the theory out of the bag, unleashed it onto the world, and now some truly inane ideas have planted themselves into leftist identity, lexicon, and ontology.

I just felt like saying “ontology.”

I recognize this is all sounding a bit elitist. As if the world can’t handle the genius of cultural theory. As if academics alone have what it takes to apply complex ideas. No, what I’m saying is, the mainstreaming of a thing requires a simplifying process so it can be digested easily by masses of people, travel fast, and apply everywhere.

The ideas become mainstream through the process of simplification, and most people have only encountered these concepts in the simplified version.

Complex, useful ideas become caricatures of themselves until eventually, the caricature is all that exists.

****

Why should we care? Well, I have a hypothesis, and I’m going to test it. I believe these terms have morphed into largely unhelpful oversimplifications that are often used more as badges of social merit than as productive analytical lenses.

While surely many of us truly use these concepts to understand the world more deeply, they have also become cultural and social capital. I’m using the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, a 1970s French sociologist, who argued that just like economic capital is passed through generations (money), there are elements of cultural and social capital that function in similar ways in terms of power, but it’s a power earned through who and what you know.

Bourdieu defined “cultural capital” as “familiarity with the legitimate culture within a society” (source).

We might call it “high culture,” – you know, the difference between growing up in New York City with two professor parents versus growing up in a rural California town where Wet Seal was the height of culture in your life. Broadway musicals, art, theater, trips to Europe versus rented movies, football games at the local high school, and marathon camping trips up and down the west coast (god, mom, that was so damn cool and so fun).

This is not about a genuine superiority of the former, but rather a recognition that we gain and transfer cultural power in more ways than just money and property. It also complicates the idea that a person born into poverty can simply get a bunch of cash and immediately join the cultural hegemony (whee I said it again!).

Bourdieu defined “social capital” as: “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a “credential” which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (The Forms of Capital, Bourdieu, 1986, pp. 248-249).

Holy shit, right?

I’m arguing that these concepts largely function as social and cultural capital by signalling “legitimate” and “high” culture in powerful institutions of business, education, and politics.

They function as markers of legitimacy and are believed to reflect the most enlightened, progressive, kind, and fair politics, as well as sufficient education level to join the group. Without the education, though, we can simply adopt the language to gain inclusion, and this is the phenomenon I wish to address because I think it’s where a lot of the weird morphing has occurred. As in, we don’t actually have to know what these words mean. Simply using them is sufficient to gain us inclusion, status, and protection among particular social groups, and we cannot pretend these are not extremely powerful groups.

And we all know how these concepts are used online. Let’s not get into it, but it’s rather evident that they’re largely meaningless and repeated in a sort of rote, almost religious or sacred speech act that serves as signals of allegiance and a buffer from critique.

So, what am I going to do?

Well, I’m going to test my hypotheses by going back to my grad school roots and research these concepts: Where they came from, who they came from, and, perhaps most importantly, what they’ve turned into. As in, what they mean now. I’ll use primary sources and do my best to trace their evolutions in a balanced way and open discussion in a non-academic way. Let’s just talk about this stuff.

Maybe society has improved these concepts over the years. Maybe I learned sad, archaic versions and the ones currently on Bluesky are better.

Who knows. But let’s find out.

Here are the terms I’ll begin with, publishing one or two essays a month. (Some will be available to everyone, some for paid only, but as usual, there are free trial paid subscriptions available to read it all free.)

1. Cultural appropriation

2. Identity politics

3. Whiteness/white privilege

4. Intersectionality

5. Gender as a social construct/performance — sex vs. gender (I may not write this one as I’m not yet ready to be called whatever I’ll be called for even gently tapping this subject with a 10-foot pole)

6. Standpoint epistemology — okay nobody talks about this but it’s too relevant to ignore

7. Cultural relativism

8. Colonization/Decolonization

9. Emotional labor (this isn’t something we talked about in grad school but it’s an interesting one to trace because it has a truly interesting history)

10. It really annoys me that I don’t yet have a tenth, so I’m writing this to make myself feel better (ten feels balanced, nine feels weird — I swear I’m fine).

Fun fact, this essay was supposed to be a short and simple intro to this series I’ll be writing. That seemed to go well.

Anyway, which terms should I add to the list? Anything you’d like to know more about?

And finally, I am fully aware that this is the most dangerous ground I’ve tread, and I have been very afraid to “go there.” That’s a separate conversation but one worth having at some point, I think. Why are we so afraid to say something deemed heretical? Why are we afraid to do anything other than smile, nod, repeat the mantras and keep our questions buried deep in our souls?

This cannot possibly help us. As I’ve said a thousand times before, good ideas should withstand critique. And the thing is, I believe these are mostly good ideas, or were at one point. I believe they have a lot to offer us.

Plus, it’s fun to learn shit.

I grabbed a few books off a bookshelf just now. one bookshelf. there are many more. just looking at them gets me all excited, remembering how all these ideas shook me