This is a translation of a blog post in Swedish by Veronica Svärd.
Post-structuralism and Michel Foucault occupies my doctoral studies at the moment. In that perspective, the debate on the concept of “hen” [an experimental Swedish gender-neutral pronoun, similar to “ey”] that’s taking place between Aftonbladet columnist Lisa Magnusson1 and freelance author Elin Grelsson2 is really interesting. Magnusson laughs mockingly at “hen” [“ey”] as an alternative to “she” and “he”, while Grelsson describes, I think really well, how the concepts of woman and man lock us in, often quite needlessly and often by force, in a variety of situations. This constant separation of people. The basic building block of discriminatory structures. Women/men, blacks/whites, homo/hetero. These categories that we then fill with valuations. The right way — the wrong way. Worth more — worth less. If you’re a black woman you get to stand behind the counter or by the assembly line and get a little less pay than the white people at the same line.
Sure, always attaching that label WOMAN is functional. It works really well, even. In order for us to know what to expect and how to relate to the other. Why, it is the fundamental division of society and the economy we’re talking about. The women, we guide towards health care and social work. The men, we guide towards technology and engineering. Bluntly put and generalized, but true. Women take care of homes and children and men take care of society. We keep playing house and the Reality People rule with an iron fist.
“But hey,” most people object, “feminists go on and on about sex and gender all the time! Pick your side already!”
Yes, we do. But we do it because we’re tired of being interpreted and valued according to those darn categories all the time. We’re tired of the fact that no child can escape being labeled as soon as they are born, or even months before being born. A child is a child: let em be a child, to explore life on eir own, without the iron fist and its economic interests.
Leave the child alone.
I’m convinced that fighting this keeping-apart and discrimination has to be done from both sides — revealing the hidden and naturalized categories in order to counteract their effects. It’s not a natural law that women ought to take care of the “little”, home and children, and men the “big” issues in society. Women can bear children — with or without men. Some choose to do so — with or without men. Men can choose to use contraceptives or not — and to have sex with or without women.
We are human beings who make different choices based on different background conditions. Let us form a world in which we provide as equal opportunities as possible — and make the choices thereafter. It’s not about “becoming all alike” as Magnusson writes — on the contrary: it’s about the fact that we are all different, not just two categories.
That’s what post-structuralism is about, and about the fact that language actually shapes us. Grelsson poignantly illustrates some aspects of this. We are shaped by language — it forces us in — and we resist using language. “Hen” is not more of an “invention” than “he” or “she”, as Magnusson implies in the followup blog post3. Language shapes society and our bodies. That’s why “hen” is an excellent post-structuralistic word in the breaking down of patriarchy.
Translation by Daniel Brockman (Twitter).