Politics of Reclamation: Cunt

By HANNAH ZEAVIN

September 6, 2010

May 1968 is the figurative (as well as literal) date assigned to the Parisian student revolution.  These students used the slogan “Pris La Parole!” This particular segment of the  generation of ’68 included the great thinkers Deleuze, Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida, Foucault, and Braidotti.  Few of them were French, though they gathered there, and I like to imagine it was because of this particular slogan: Pris La Parole! Seize the Word! These theorists took all words, all symbols, and dominated the intellectual sphere in continental feminism and philosophy– and continue to do so in 2010.  Sounds good, one might think.  With the motto “Seize the Word,” one can seize the word and take over an entire continent! Or at least get Charles De Gaulle to compromise his desires.  What about just one word, a word that historically has had a horrible connotation, a word that seeks to harm, a powerful symbol beyond the sonic.  Is this seizable? What does it mean to reclaim the word used against you?  It would be productive if one could take the history of the symbol, including the power that is used against oneself, and turn it into something that one could use as one’s own.  Reclamation must not just occur on the superficial level, but instead must permeate the national memory.

I can remember being fourteen years old and wishing I could reclaim the word “Fuck.”   The “CK” sound is my favorite sound in the English language.  I wanted “Fuck” to be a fine word, so I could just say it, particularly in class.  I obviously had not yet grown out of my belief in magical thinking.   As much as I tried to tell my friends, or my mother that it was just sonically pleasing, they insisted it made me sound like a trash-talking sailor, could I please stop, thank you.  So “fuck” (in the non-sexual sense) was unreclaimable.  Though I felt it was inoffensive, when I used it outside of the vacuum-that-is-my-mind, others– the listeners– were still affected.  To them, it was a gross word, indicating an aggravated speaker.  The English-speaking world seemed to agree, and use “fuck” as it wished.  “Fuck” may bother or may not, but it is not aimed at anyone in particular beyond those present for it: the speaker and the hearer (regardless of construction).  Each individual hearer and speaker will experience the symbol differently in their lifetime.

There are other words, however, that do not necessitate a hearer to be directed.  The subject may change, but the word’s object is continuous.  This is due to the symbolic power the word has historically.  “Cunt” is this kind of word.  “Cunt” means: I, the hater-subject, think “Cunt” when you, the woman-object, are in my presence.  “Cunt” can be more nuanced when embedded in a linguistic context.  “What a Cunt!”   “Shut up, Cunt!”  “You are just a Cunt.”

“Cunt,” though perhaps even more harmful when embedded in this kind of sentence, exists as a contextualized symbol barring and transferring its own history.  One meaning of the word indicates a fertile place, a nook between two rocks, but it is undoubtably not the origin.  Indeed, it might already be one of the original uses of the word as symbol.  (For instance, when the French discovered the Grand Teton Mountains, they named them thus because they looked like breasts.)  Jonathan Wilson writes about the word cunt in his book Dirty Words. He asserts that there is difficulty in determining the linguistic origin of the word. However, there are two likely theories, or two words that are referred to as the root of “cunt.”  The first is the Latin word cutis, meaning skin.  The second is the Anglo-Saxon ge-cynd-lim, meaning womb.

Let us return to these embedded sentences again with the word “womb” replacing the word “cunt,” in order to mitigate the historical violence.  “What a womb!”   “Shut up, womb.”  “You are just a womb.”  Even the origin of the word is problematic, if less violent.  First wave feminists, or suffragettes, were fighting against this kind of ideology.  “We are not wombs, also brains, and equal!”–Wollstonecraft.  Second wave feminist sisters joined in this historical cry, “We have wombs. Yes, it is part of what is different about us–but don’t deny women’s rights, or drive me to suicide because of my womb!”–Betty Friedan.  Even now, “I choose whether or not to perform my womb, but it is not all I perform.”–Judith Butler.  If “womb” as a symbol is problematic when assigned to women, what about “Cunt”, which also carries with it a violent connotation?  “Cunt”  has been the word, used by men, against women, or more rarely, women against one another.  “Cunt”, is a symbol for femininity.  If you want to pris that parole, of course you may.  There will be a remainder in what is communicated.  The word will never be fully stripped of its violence.  We can restrain the word “cunt” by using it in the place of friend, or comrade, or even woman.  This may be successful over time, but the history of the world cannot be erased.  The symbol will contain the historical violence, as it does now.  In the present moment, in my ear, using the word “cunt” is an identification with the oppressor, with part of its methodology, ideology, and history.  This history is, of course, also part of mine.

Hannah Zeavin is a junior in Yale College. She is the managing editor of Broad Recognition.