My thoughts on academic writing & language: books should be accessibly written but sometimes frustration with expression is simply one’s own lack of fluency in modes of thought. I’ve certainly put down books and thought: what? I think vocabularies are important.

The theoretical fluency needs to access an argument is part of a collective push toward ‘knowing’; the words chosen are often part of a wider discourse that takes time to appreciate & decode. E.g. I think it’s perfectly fine to use the word ‘heteronormativity’ when I write.

Once I ensure that I’ve explained what I mean by ‘heteronormativity’ at least once in the piece. I see too much written that uses heteronormativity interchangeably with ‘heterosexuality’ to know that this is needed. I find it useful. However, I am also conscious that a lot is

Potentially *lost* when we repeat words like ‘heteronormativity’ without further gloss. Using these words should also give us an opportunity to revisit them, to flesh them out, to critique, to stretch, to bend them slightly out of shape. Academic or theoretical language is useful

Because it is clearly a way of entering into a different kind of ‘thinking’ (it’s not called critical theory for nothing, right?). It becomes problematic, I think, when writing parrots theoretical words without explanation, examination or critique. It becomes quite blocked.

It’s obviously a problem when writing misrepresents the meaning ascribed to these terms: culprits include ‘heteronormativity’; ‘phallo-centrism’; ‘queer’ (honestly, queer is the most abused word in theoretical history); ‘abject’. I could go on. But I don’t think we should give up

A lot will depend on the audience your writing is pitched at. My first book was definitely pitched at scholars in my field & PhDs entering into the field.I don’t know if I could write *that* book for another audience?I’d prob write a different book.Who did Derrida pitch to?

I often think about that. Like, who did Foucault think he was writing to and for? The answer is usually other scholars versed in some of the materials/ideas worked through in the book. This isn’t an excuse or apologia for academic writing; it is something to consider though.

And if you think, we’ll that’s just not ‘ ‘democratic’ (another word that’s free floating) then you are right. There’s lots that’s exclusionary about knowledge & who gets to access it. Knowledge is power. But does the exclusion come from the way the book is written?

Maybe both the exclusion and the ‘way in which the book was written’ are products of the same power structures, ones which ensure (a certain people are kept from knowledge (b language and it’s functions are limited. Remember words matter. Critical theory jargon is transgressive.

In my most generous moments, I can see critical theory language as an attempt to wrestle with meaning; to abuse language in order to transgress established ways of ‘understanding’.

I don’t know if it’s possible to write in such ways in 2020. I think one philosopher and critical theorist who manages to get it completely right is @SaraNAhmed Her writing is dense but light; learned but accessible. She is the Yoda, the Jedi master of the critical force!

So it’s fine to complain about academic writing being accessible. I think it would be a shame to not also orientate oneself in relation to that same complaint & to be cognisant of the history of critical theory (which is an institutional as well as activist one, I know). Anyway