Max Jack-Monroe
Over the past several months, I’ve thought a lot about the idea of accessibility to knowledge. As a student at a renowned university with a plethora of resources at my disposal, I have privilege that most don’t. Especially as someone studying topics such as language and gender and sexuality, which are of worldwide importance, it often makes me feel uneasy to know and talk about things that don’t have the resources and/or space to.
Last semester, I was presented with concrete examples as to how to make knowledge more accessible to people outside of the academia bubble. In my Women’s Studies class, my professor, Dr. Alex Ketchum, an alum of McGill who is now a course lecturer at the school, brought our attention to some of the work she has done throughout the past several years in order to bring her dissertation topic to the masses. She has created websites and twitter accounts that are easy to find, easy to read, updated often. Now anyone, regardless of background, who is interested in learning more about feminist cafés, coffeehouses, and restaurants has access to that information at their fingertips. Dr. Ketchum continues to work hard to make knowledge accessible, which is the theme of one of her latest undertakings, The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies Practices Speaker and Workshop Series.
Seeing Dr. Ketchum’s work and reflecting on my own experience, I decided to make a website related to my research interest of queer language and sociolinguistics. Especially as queer people have long depended on the internet as a safe haven and a knowledge hub, a website seemed like the inherent way to get information out to the masses, queer and otherwise. Queerlanguage.com is still very much in its early stages, but it truly is a labour of love, and, I see it as much more than a simple class project. The website includes information that would otherwise only be available to someone with access to a university database and/or sufficient amounts of time and effort, as well as the words of everyday queer people and their own experiences with queer language and sociolinguistics.
Reading Dr. Alison Crump’s (2019) article on the founding of http://bild-lida.ca/educationalsociolinguistics/, “Thinning the classroom walls: Graduate student perspectives on blogging as pedagogy,” further validated my decision to make a website that is not only accessible to the masses, but contains many voices and experiences. I hope to continue to feature different perspectives on the website as I delve deeper into the work. I can’t wait to see where queerlanguage.com goes from here!
Work Cited:
Crump, A. (2019). Thinning the classroom walls: Graduate student perspectives on blogging as pedagogy. Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity, 2(2) (n.p.)
Max Jack-Monroe! I have to respond to your post because your name is so like my baby boy’s name, and I don’t think I’ll come across many people in life to whom I can say that. His name is John Munroe (two first names). Sometimes we call him Munroe. But never John. I’m sure one day, he’ll surprise us and find whole new ways of being who he is, being named.
Also, I LOVE your website. I read the whole conversation, which took exactly as long as nursing young John Munroe to sleep.
Rheostatic is a word that takes me back to Ontario in the 90s (check out The Rheostatics, an indie band from the era). I never thought to question what the name meant, where it came from.
I am very curious to know if you have had any reader responses to the conversation data you generated and shared publicly. Curious to know if any of the people you included in the conversation have read your website, had reactions.
Great horn tootin’!
Cheers,
Alison
What a beautiful website. Your queer professor salutes you! I think you may have started something…
I agree that this is a great blog and I hope you continue. I find that there is a great deal of misunderstanding and often blatant misinformation around trans language and gender-neutral pronouns in particular, so this is very valuable scholarship that needs to be shared as widely as possible. It’s also great how you keep track of queer language evolution in both English and French–I didn’t know before Eden’s comment that many trans people prefer to use English because it is more gender-neutral.
I can’t wait to see what you do with this blog. On one hand, I think there is definitely an opportunity to do some “queer language for dummies”-type posts, even though I know that it’s frustrating to explain what may seem obvious. A rebuke to Jordan Peterson/Doug Ford etc. shouldn’t be necessary but would still be useful. I also love the title of “Queer Language Evolution” and it would be great to see a timeline of how queer language has evolved and what kind of predictions queer linguists have for the future.
–Brian