I received Brigitte Vasallo’s last book “Inclusive language and class exclusion” (published in its original version in 2021) as a gift for my graduation. It looked small and interesting so I thought I could finish it in a few days, and I did. I read it in a couple of days and I was ready to put it back in my library, together with all the precious essays I own. Then I realized I did not understand anything about this book, so I started it again. This time with a pencil in my hand, underlining and taking notes. It took me two months to finish it and at the end, I still felt like I was missing a lot of interesting points. So here I am, writing an article about it, trying to analyze it even more, to understand it better, as it’s one of the most interesting books I have read in the last few years.
“Inclusive language and class exclusion” talks about culture and who can access and produce culture, it talks about inclusive language and who includes whom, it talks about generations and what is being transmitted from one to the next. It talks about institutional learning and female bodies. It talks about the destruction of class awareness. It talks about social media and the trap of representation. It talks about words, spaces, privacy, capitalism and reframes the debate on inclusive language in the capitalistic system we live in. Who are we including? Who has the power to include? And why? The author raises many interesting questions, without the presumption of giving answers.
The inculturation of misery
Brigitte Vasallo’s family comes from Galicia, moved to France to then move to Catalunya, a poor and illiterate family, who taught her everything orally. Family is the starting point of everyone’s life, the social class we’re coming from determines a big part of our life, which services and places we can have access to, which decisions we are able to take, what role we can have in society and so on Vasallo reflects on the fact that migration creates smaller families and shrinks generational memory. When many generations have lived in the same small village, the narration of their history becomes visual, you can see in which house your grandmother was born, people recognise you as the nephew of someone, your story is perceived in the space your family has been growing up in and you build your own personal memory that you will transmit to your children and grandchildren.
When you migrate to another country or to a big city, that generational memory is lost and so is your family history and together with that, you lose generational fears, like hunger, or a generational way of speaking, like dialects. This is what Vasallo calls “the inculturation of misery”: if you inherit the fear of being hungry, you will make certain decisions in life that will allow you to live a more secure life. When you come from a family that hasn’t suffered from poverty you might take more risky decisions and it can also determine how politically active you are. When you have a family house you can always go back to, you might decide to live in a squat, occupy an abandoned building, because if the police come and evict you, you’ll have a safety net to go back to. If your family members struggled to secure themselves a house, you probably won’t risk being evicted from occupied spaces and will want to be sure you’re able to pay rent.
Can the subaltern speak?
One of the first topics Vasallo analyses is the right that subaltern and marginalized people have to speak and interact with the power. For “marginalized people” she means the poors, the queers, the racialized individuals, the people that come from small and unknown villages. Can the marginalized speak? Yes, as long as they adapt their language to the language spoken in higher classes, as long as they change themselves to fit into a class they don’t belong to, as long as they can fake it.
The subaltern can speak their subaltern language with their peers, but not when they need to be taken seriously, not when they interact with power figures, not in universities, not in tv shows, because in those cases they need to adapt and perform different social class manners. But if the subalterns have to transform themselves so deeply to then become someone else, then what’s left of the collective effort to escape misery and poorness? Do social classes still exist? Yes. What we have lost, as a society, is class awareness. If we don’t recognise the social class we belong to anymore, then are we still fighting for something? What power does the collective hold and what is it fighting for, if the collective awareness is lost in the individual transformation to become someone else, someone that is more accepted?
The validation of knowledge
One of the points that Vasallo makes and that I related the most with, is about university and academic learning. In our societies the only validated form of knowledge is the one coming from academic recognition, in the form of degrees and bachelors. The other forms of learning, like debates with peers, oral transmission, readings of your own choice based on your needs and curiosity, but that don’t give certificates and formal recognition, are not considered valid and so end up being somehow discouraged.
This system creates a circle of injustice because access to academies is already restricted to certain classes, but it is also a class necessity, in terms that it promises a better future for those who complete their studies and therefore facilitates access to certain jobs. Money gives access to books, which give access to money. We’ve been trained to think that only certified knowledge is valid and we get annoyed or even angry when someone who has certain competences, but doesn’t have an institutional title for it, finds a qualified job. Not having a certification for your knowledge can determine which jobs you have or don’t have access to, therefore can determine which class you’ll end up being part of.
Is inclusive language really inclusive?
If it’s true that academic titles and important jobs give you something, like money, social recognition and complicated terms that only you and your new peers can understand, it is also true that they are asking you to renounce to something else if you’re coming from a poor social class. You’ll have to give up the simple language that you might have been using at home, the comfortable old clothes, the hair on your body and all the things that the academic narration points out as uncivilized, as backwardness. You’ll have to conform to the academic lifestyle and become someone else.
It’s in this frame that the author wonders if the inclusive language is actually inclusive or if it’s a way of speaking and writing that only belongs to academia and social networks. Who are we speaking to with the inclusive language? And who is trying to include who? This is also a matter of class, because those who don’t have the tools and economic possibilities to understand this new language, will still be excluded. Clear and simple language can reach everyone, technical terms most likely exclude. Inclusive language is refined and lives in specific environments and on social media, which are private platforms managed by algorithms.
Words are not inclusive or exclusive per se, words are not sexist per se, it all depends on how we use them, where, why. Gender emancipation does not belong to linguistics, but to politics.
What people do when they double terms in masculine and feminine declensions, with specific gender neutral terms and so on, is to create a denormalization of the system, it is to question the system. Gender in grammar is not sexist, but the resistance that its denormalization encounters is indeed sexist.
The system is binary and doesn’t allow anything that’s not binary, so inclusive language is there to challenge this system, to create tension by using new terms, to show the unease, to make noise to encourage a movement that wants to create a change.
What we need to pay attention to is that this “movement” happens through the creation of new terms and signs that are reproduced in social media, that produce new books and so on, fitting perfectly in the capitalistic system that always requires more production of cultural products. But does this language really include more people or only those that have the tools to understand them? Are we getting stuck in the same capitalistic way of thinking? Who are we talking to when we use inclusive language? Vasallo doesn’t give a specific answer, but leaves these questions open to personal reflection.
Art consumption and art production
The debate on the “access to art” has been focusing only on the access to the consumption of art and not on the production of art. Art is a very broad term that contains all its possible forms. Art is perfectly inserted in the capitalistic society we live in and only certain kinds of art expression are accepted as cultural products. There has to be a certain “elevation” in the art production, art needs to be produced inside certain frames that the elites choose and have power on.
”How can you produce art when you’re poor or when poverty has been your primary form of inculturation? And how can you perform art without performing the elite manners that allow you to produce art?” asks Vasallo.
Culture is everything, the way we move, we talk, we post on social media, we dance with friends… but cultural products are just a small portion of culture that is inserted in the iper-precarization of the artistic work sector. We see the cultural products as something sacred, but they contain the views of those who have the privilege to dedicate their time to the creation of artistic products. Most accepted and recognised artists have been producing art knowing that if they failed, they probably had a family that could save them from economic misery.
Education and the efforts to make it as accessible as possible for everyone, is focused on the access to knowledge as a user, observer, learner, but not as the producer of knowledge. To become someone that produces culture, there has to be a mandatory passage from one lower class to a higher class, you need to become the elite. The point is never the cultural project per se, but who decides the legitimization of that cultural product as such.
Cultural production is highly monopolized by dominant classes that have the privilege to work for pleasure and not for money and it keeps being created always by the same people. The more art becomes accessible and cheap, the more inaccessible its production becomes. The consequence of this process is that the art we get access to comes from the bourgeoisie and shows a certain spectrum of reality, the one that the power allows to show, but struggles to portrait those aspects of life and social battles against the oppressors and the power figures. Therefore it is important to financially support independent artists if we want to get access to a more free kind of art. Who has access to the opportunity to express themselves? To say what? To whom?
Women’s bodies and their “liberation”
There are way too many things to write about the “liberation” of women’s bodies, but I would like to focus only on one aspect from Vasallo’s book that really stuck with me. She writes about her aunt Erundina always having a mustache and hair on her body. The author thought it was an uncivilized representation of a body and did not give any political meaning to the fact that a woman from a small poor village didn’t know that modern and educated women shave their bodies. But when modern and educated women stopped shaving and called that “liberation”, then also Vasallo stopped shaving and felt liberated, even though that liberated body already existed in her family and was in front of her eyes, but that somehow did not teach her anything.
I wouldn’t know how to further develop this concept, but this image from the author’s life is something that I keep thinking about, so I will leave the reader the space for their own reflection. What is a liberated woman’s body? Does it have hair? Does it dress up masculine? Does it have tattoos? Does it wear high heels and lipstick? What is a liberated woman’s body? And who chooses what it looks like?
Social network: the slavery of the appearance
A big part of today’s capitalistic products is made of information, language, words, shares, memes, information.. All that is being shared online is a capitalistic product and it generates images, representations.
“Everything that was once experimentable directly, has now moved further into a representation” – Guy Debord. Life has now often become a representation of life. The platforms in which we express ourselves are private companies that we feed with our appearances and that make profit out of it. We often don’t look for what we desire, but we desire what we’re seeing, we’re losing ourselves in this game of representations.
Our private space, what we are not showing and what is most humane, like failures, abandonment, getting old, getting fat, snoring, is what is saving us from capitalism. “Maybe the only thing that is still ours, that remains private, real, is what we love the least in ourselves and in our lives. What is saving us from capitalism is what capitalism has been teaching us we should hate in ourselves” – Brigitte Vasallo.
Conclusion
In the last few years, thanks to therapy, to activists I found on social media, to university classes, to books and to long talks I’ve been having with my friends, I’m feeling in a constant flow of learning and unlearning.
So many expectations, behaviors, appearances have been imposed on everyone’s bodies and minds, it’s hard to understand what someone really likes or feels or wants.
This book helped me realize that this difficult journey starts with one’s awareness of their understanding of reality. As Vasallo says “understanding why we interpret reality in a certain way, is an emancipation process”. I’m walking on this emancipation process, not being sure where it will lead me, but hoping it will bring me closer to a deeper listening of myself and to a sense of community and belonging, wherever I’ll be in space.
