Should We Stop Saying "Poly"?

[joreth]

I've been seeing the "polya" abbreviation being used for a while now, and at first I thought it was just someone who didn't speak English very well. Then I started hearing rumblings in the community that some people wanted us to all stop using the abbreviation "poly" to refer to polyamory because Polynesian people also use the abbreviation "poly"

Comments

[margareta87]

This is totally new to me, too, and I'm struggling with it on a number of levels.

So in a lot of social justice spaces, there's a prevailing ethos that if a member of a marginalized group that you belong to asks you to stop doing because it's hurting them, you should just stop doing that thing and not argue about it, because your privilege stops you from understanding why the thing you're doing is wrong.

The problem is that sometimes the person asking you to stop doing that thing is actually wrong, but you can't point that out because then you look like an asshole.

The use of the word "poly" is not a case of cultural appropriation, as with words like "two-spirited," nor is it a case of people casually using or repurposing offensive terms like the n-word or r-word. This is, as far as I can see, a case of a group of marginalized people asking for exclusive use of a term that has long been in use in many contexts (a Twitter search for #poly also turned up yoga mats and vinyl records...) because they believe either that 1. They are more marginalized than the other people using it, and/or 2. They were using it first. This is not an argument I've seen before, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but my gut reaction is "No."

If we were to accept this argument, we'd need to accept both 1 and 2, as well as the idea that 1 and 2 are both good reasons for one group of people to stop using an identifier they've used for decades. And then we'd have to get into who's more marginalized than whom and...yeah.

It feels to me like the folks on Tumblr and the people who are backing them up are trying to extend arguments about cultural appropriation to a context where it just doesn't map. In fact, it seems to display a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what cultural appropriation is.

That said, now that we know that the hashtag #poly is used in multiple contexts, it seems like a good thing to do to spell it out where possible, just to make it easier for different groups to find each other. And in things like blog post and book titles, it makes sense just for purposes of finding those things and identifying them for people unfamiliar with the content. And the editor in me likes to spell out abbreviated terms on first use anyway. But as far as I can see, there's no compelling reason to drop the usage as shorthand in poly-specific contexts or in subsequent usages in a single piece after it's been spelled out in the title or the first usage in an article.

For my part, I find it interesting to know how other people are using the word, and that knowledge will be useful to me in identifying my content for others to find. But I haven't seen a good argument for dropping the label. At the same time, I realize that there are people who will think my refusal to do that, or even my commenting on it, is rooted in my privilege. But I don't yet buy that we need to do *everything* a marginalized person asks just because they are marginalized.

Unrelated, I will note that the use of "Indian" is all over the map. Some native people in the US claim it proudly, while most in Canada consider it extremely offensive and derogatory. Same with "tribe," which is used in the US but considered offensive in Canada. It's actually been a thing when I've been applying for contracts, as I always struggle with whether to change the names of previous US clients, e.g. from "the XYZ Indian Tribe" (which is often the official name) to "the XYZ Native Band" (the non-offensive Canadian version that also happens to be wrong).

[joreth]

Yep, I'm with you, I think this is being spun as cultural appropriation when it isn't and also a classic mixup of "I feel hurt" = "someone is hurting me". Very often, we can feel hurt when no one is, in fact, hurting us.

I'm fine with pausing by default when an oppressed people says "stop, this hurts us", but then I think we need to actually examine the situation to see if we are really hurting someone or if this is an individual who is not clear on the tools of oppression and simply sees oppression as existing by default because they are oppressed (if that makes sense?).

After actually considering this particular case and not just reacting, I agree with you that this is not a case of either cultural appropriation or of oppression, just of two independent cultures running in to each other and in order to make the case to stop using the word, we have to choose a winner in the Oppression Olympics when it'd be better to just clarify when there is confusion.

[margareta87]

FWIW, it appears the hashtag #polya is already in use for...something that I don't get but that seems to have to do with math:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23polya&src=typd