Polari, pronouns, spiders
Talking about non-humans and the limits of queer language
Pronouns express attitudes and relationships.
I met this concept recently while listening to a linguistics podcast and it moved me in a way I’m not used to. I think a lot of what queer and trans folks are saying about pronouns is so close to my experience that it’s transparent to me. And let’s face it, most of it is just education for other people. So of course we should have autonomy, respect and consent, that much, surely, was obvious. But ‘attitudes and relationships’, now that’s juicy.
And it brings me to something that I’ve been rubbing up against for a while now, something that connects with animacy, ecology and femininity. And pronouns. And spiders.
I’ve noticed that I relate to the spiders who live in my home differently to a lot of people. I regularly give them names and refer to them using she pronouns - and I always have. She’s beautiful. She’s big. She’s made another web all over the shower head.
It’s cute, right? Or do you maybe find it horrifying? If you are wondering how I could impose binary gender upon these innocent animals, or how I could be so thoughtless as to reproduce oppression with my language choices, let me explain*.
First, it might help to note a few things: I am not versed enough in spider anatomy to know the sex of the individual cellar spiders (Pholcus phalangioides) who share my bathroom, and my pronoun choice wasn’t referring to anything biological. Also, sex categories are complex, unstable, relational and contextual so forget about it.
Secondly, this fabulous pronoun use derives from Polari which uses ‘she’ as a way to feminise and familiarise a subject.
Polari
Polari was, and is, a cant slang from the UK with roots in queer**, criminal, working-class and sex working communities. In other words, my people. Okay, it was also used by professional wrestlers and sailors, but you get my point - it is an important part of my cultural and linguistic heritage.
Polari is often described as a secret language, but it’s more like a cant: a form of slang used to exclude outsiders, in this case straight people and cops among others. It’s often described as Victorian, although it was in common use until the 1970s. It’s often described as dead, but Polari lives on. It has had an important impact on language, some of its lexicon and grammar continue in use today and it continues to inspire new creations including queer fiction***.
You might know it in the words ‘jhujh’, ‘butch’, ‘camp’, ‘drag’ and ‘(rough) trade’. If you’re from the UK, you might recognise Polari words like ‘naff’, ‘khazi’ or ‘scarper’. And some of us might even dare to use she pronouns to “feminise and familiarise a subject”. I don’t know if linguists would agree, but I think this familiarising comes dangerously close to animacy.
Animacy
In English and many other Indo-European languages, pronoun use marks a distinction of how animate, how alive, how familiar, the speaker believes the subject to be.
If a speaker calls a wild fox ‘it’ but a domestic dog ‘he’ or ‘she’, it has to do with how close they perceive the canine in question. If someone refers to a human baby as ‘it’, that speaks volumes about their relationship to babies. Again, it’s all about attitudes and relationships.
If you go back a few paragraphs, you’ll also notice that I wrote “the individual spiders who share my bathroom” not “that share” because of course they’re alive and of course I love them. Sometimes I even show that love by calling them ‘she’.
I’ve been speaking like this, confusing editors and, I suspect, high school English teachers, for a very long time.
I’m excited about creativity and intentional change towards liberation in our language choices. ‘Ki’ and ‘kin’, animistic pronouns influenced by Anishinaabe / Anishinaabemowin, for example, are becoming more widely known and I’ve heard white European queers start to incorporate them in their languages. (I’m personally cautious to use them at least until explicitly invited, as I am not Anishinaabe, and my understanding of the language involved is extremely limited.)
I also know people who use ‘they’ for all non-humans.
There are times where I might seem to do this as well. There’s a hawthorn tree in the park for example and if I talk about them with friends (usually in the context of collecting some of their fruits for medicine) then I’ll probably call them ‘they’. Hawthorns are multi-sex individuals and I don’t like using ‘it’ for all the reasons I just mentioned. All language is symbols anyway; it’s good enough for now.
But I’ve experienced another use of ‘they’ that seems to be a form of queer signalling that has little to do with the actual non-human in question. Again: attitudes and relationships.
Discussing ducks
Let me give you an example. Say I’m in a park with a human friend and we’re observing mallard ducks swimming and feeding in a pond. We’re excited, we’re talking about them and at some point, I notice that we’re both noticeably, even forcibly, using different pronouns.
The other person: “Look, that one is putting their head under again!”
Me: “I think he’s collecting weed from the bottom of the pond.”
“It must be tasty. They seem to be enjoying it.”
“Yes, he does!”
I think the motivation of the other person is to highlight that sex is complex and arbitrary and at least partially a social and cultural construction. Fair enough. And yet, sex (by whichever definition) is an important aspect of a mallard’s life, and if the mallard in question has male-typical plumage or female-typical plumage or something else then that does mean something, especially to other mallards.
I personally feel entirely capable of speaking about male mallards, female mallards, intersex mallards and so on while also holding the complexities and projections inherent in those ideas.
And honestly, if we stop using any language that involves projections and simplifications, I’m not sure how far biology, or even just observation, can go.
Species definitions such as ‘mallard’ are also constructed and unstable. Just as there are no essential differences between categories of male and female, there’s also no essence of being a mallard, a duck, a bird, or an animal. For that matter there are no mallards without the pondweed, no pondweed without the rain or sun. There is no you, no me, no species, no individuals at all. I’m not even being pedantic; these really are unstable categories which all blur into each other if we look closely enough.
If this ‘queering’ of language were consistent (and wasn’t so focused on sex, gender and humans), there are a lot of things that might become too complicated to speak about in the real world. At some point, I think it’s okay to accept that language - at least this one - is an imperfect tool to describe the complexities of life. I also believe that we are more capable of holding conflicting, complex ideas than we give ourselves credit for.
Autonomy, respect and consent
The danger is also that this forcible use of ‘they’ isn’t only limited to ducks in ponds (who honestly, don’t care), I’ve heard it being used for all people. Sometimes this is a neutral-until-you-tell-me-otherwise stand in (which seems respectful to me). And sometimes it’s because the speaker ‘doesn’t believe in’ other people’s gender experiences.
Not everyone’s gender experience of course - it’s mostly used against trans women.
This reminds me of what Jules Gill-Peterson’s described in A Short History of Trans Misogyny as “a queer utopia of gender in which everyone else is set free by getting rid of a backward trans womanhood.”
Misgendering – even by queers - is also about attitudes and relationships.
At least when I ‘she’ spiders, in the tradition of my Polari-speaking cultural ancestors, I’m doing so mindfully and to express affection. I noticeably don’t use this kind of pronoun substitution for humans because, again, I believe in autonomy, respect and consent.
Language choices like these can be powerful and empowering: they are a part of my queer and environmental work for good reason. But they are rarely consistent and always say more about the language user than the world we are trying to describe.
Most importantly, I can say with complete confidence that the spider in my shower cares more about having a safe place to live than which words I use, or think, to refer to her. †
On the other hand, if the way I talk and think about her causes me to familiarise her, treat her with respect, be careful in my interactions with her, carefully place her somewhere else while I take a shower so she doesn’t get washed down the plughole, then pronouns and their effects on attitudes and relationships made a big difference to her life.
Perhaps my Polari-infused pronouns are a meaningful form of queering language. Or maybe they are cute and frivolous - themselves wildly undervalued femme qualities.
I know for sure that I like to overthink things and there are bigger problems in the world. I love language investigation as much as the next queer, but our ecosystems are being destroyed and trans people are being imprisoned and the world is on fire. Maybe that’s enough abstractions for now… there’s work to be done.
* just in the name of curiosity and investigation. Poor people don’t need to justify the way we speak.
** and what we might now call, for example, gay, bi, trans, femme, etc but also a lot of identities expressed in Polari. I’m not completely sure how this works, maybe linguistic historians can explain it to me.
*** my second novel, Conserve and Control includes dialogues in Polari and its use as a language of resistance to environmental destruction. The first (partial) translation of my writing was also into Polari which has led to some really cute bi/trilingual performances with friends.
† I think she might also want an end to capitalism and ecocide, but I haven’t found a way to ask her yet.