Jargon in excelsis

Weary-eyed from my day of gallery-hopping, I plucked a book at random from a shelf at the Tate Modern shop. Flicking through, I skimmed several passages, before lingering on a certain page. Amidst the dense text, the word “cisheteropatriarchal” loomed as an inconvenient obstruction.

For a while, I read the word as “shish-eteropatriarchal”, and, in my hungry state, believed that kebab shops were finally being exposed for their role in oppressing women. Shish, the patriarchy never tasted so good. Licking my lips, the word began to separate in a different way, and my mouth dried as I decoded the intended meaning.

Among many other  ideas contained within Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism — a book that contains chapters such as “Sex robots as a product of colonialist masculinity” and “Sex robots as trigger for regressive feminism” — the author, Heather Parry, deploys the term cisheteropatriarchy to demarcate the role of cis and white males in the patriarchal structure of society.

The niche subject of this book and the frankly absurd ideas it contains mean that it is unlikely to enter many homes, despite its snazzy purple cover. However, the fact that it was on sale in one of Britain’s national galleries is indicative of an endemic problem plaguing the industries surrounding culture. Political opinions are imported from the universities and prepackaged within increasingly impenetrable words, which have the dual impact of edifying theories that sparkle with phony scientism and muddying public cultural encounters.

This trend is particularly deducible in matters pertaining to gender. Once a fruitful theoretical lens to examine the past, gender has become increasingly detached from the ways in which humans experience their own bodies. The resultant situation is one of distance, or disembodiment. Early rifts in feminist art practice, for example, concerned how much female artists could locate an essential feminine consciousness in the body. Judy Chicago created her landmark Dinner Party in 1979, an installation comprising a series of ceramic vaginas set at the place of named significant women from history. The centrality of vulvic iconography provoked criticism from contemporaries, such as the feminist artist Mary Kelly, for its close identification of women with biology.

Chicago and Kelly represent two conflicting schools of feminism. So-called TERFs veil themselves in academia, later being steam-rolled in cultural institutions that are characterized by brash virtue-signaling. Not needing to engage fully, terms such as the “cisheteropatriarchy” plant judgement in mouths without equipping users with theoretical knowledge or practical know-how. Simply, they roll off the tongue and sound intelligent enough to bob along in the quotidian office swell.

George Orwell wrote about the tendency to rely on well-worn rhythmic phrases in his short essay, ”Politics and the English Language”. He denounced what he calls “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else”. The reason behind this authorial decision, he explains, “is that it is easy.” Rhythms are readymade. Sounding right, feeling right, is a substitute for mental exertion and precise meaning itself.

The addition of “hetero” and “cis” adds undeniable rhythm — the word becomes a melodic line rather than a semibreve. Space is claimed on the page to assert presence. Maybe this is how women will take over the world, through greedy page-grabbing garble. But, again, this fight is theoretical and separate from experience.

“Words, words, words”, Hamlet laments. Repetition in this excerpt implies frustration with the inadequacy of language as a means of human expression. Towards this creative endeavour, poets combine rhythm and meaning; artists combine colour and form. On the page, words are mere black-and-white incarnations that rattle empty of reality. It seems baffling, therefore, that the word “cisheteropatriarchal” would ever emerge to describe human behaviour. The octagonal syllabic structure dries eyeballs.

Desire to disentangle meaning is dispelled through impatience to reach the “patriarchy” part, something that affects familiarity-induced relief. “Your grandmother is so old that she still says the ‘patriarchy’,” future generations may sigh, apologetic over the archaic term. Time moves quickly, and the patriarchy is already too easy: binary; oppression and submission; male and female. In fact, the familiar nature of the “patriarchy” explains why it has been drawn out in skeins of academic entrails.

The result of this distancing from evidence-based theory is a widening chasm between the public and industries surrounding culture

“Patriarchy” used to be a nod towards a highly complex and disputable way of organising society. These more recent addendums peacock moral virtuousness in fashionable academic garb, trading descriptive value for acceptable opinion. Recently, a delightful young boy that I look after coined the word “honeyglub” to describe spilt honey. Him and I now use it in conversation to the bewilderment of passersby. Unlike the postmodernists, he coined the word from visual experience: the “honey” part is self-explanatory, whilst “glub” refers to a bubble-like shape. The word “cisheteropatriarchy”, however, assumes a web of theoretical knowledge. Honeyglub would be apt to describe how the reader gets stuck to its mangled letters on the page.

The result of this distancing from evidence-based theory is a widening chasm between the public and industries surrounding culture. To see how this works in practice, one can look at the removal of the oil painting Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) from the wall of Manchester Art Gallery in 2018. Sonia Boyce removed the work — a depiction of bare-chested nymphs — to draw attention to how curators select what visitors see in a gallery context. Outrage followed online, as members of the public accused the gallery of censoring the female nude. Criticisms of puritanism and censorship were met with accusations that these were strategies “for concealing the heteropatriarchal values that are perpetuated by the naturalisation of sexual violence”. Theoretical diatribe is used to explain away these accusations, despite the ironic claim that it is the heteropatriarchy which is concealed.

By the time of finishing this article, new addendums will be added to now-archaic terms. Familiarity and critical self-examination will stay away as the hot potato is passed through departments and conferences. Future form is unforeseeable, but one can be sure that the next iteration will be as appealing as a soggy kebab downtrodden in the gutter, greasy paper glistening in the rising sun.