Feminist discourse question, sort of

[dr_whom]

There's this phrase "check your privilege", which I see in a lot of feminist discourse. I can't tell exactly what it means. There are three obvious possible meanings it could have:

• "Check", as in "check the weather". Be aware of your privilege.
• "Check", as in "hold something in check". Restrain your privilege.
• "Check", as in "check your bags". Leave behind your privilege.

These three possible meanings are all basically equally appropriate in the same contexts, which means you can't actually use context to distinguish which meaning is actually intended. And since it's a bit of a catchphrase, its specific meaning isn't usually explained in detail. ...This is kind of awesome, actually, as a linguistic phenomenon (three very different meanings of the same word, indistinguishable in context!), and the discourse function of the phrase is the same in any case, but it leaves me wondering even if people using the phrase all have the same specific meaning in mind for it.

There's an interestingly bizarre semantics/pragmatics interaction for you.

EDIT: There's a post on Language Log about another case where two different words with the same pronunciation and different meanings nonetheless lead to the same meaning for the full sentence—in this case, its and it's.

Comments

[zdenka]

It's not a phrase I use myself, but my understanding is it means the first.

[sandmantv.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Not that interesting I think. I believe it means both 1 and 2 with the implication that 1 leads to 2 for any sane person such that they are indistinguishable.
3 I think is impossible by the lights of those who use this phrase commonly. You can't leave our privilege behind its always with us, and thinking you have left it behind is often the problem. The best we can do is be aware of it and restrain it.

The other phrase I've heard is "audit your privilege". Which if they are synonymous, points towards 1.

[pastwatcher]

I do think it means all three, and the word is cool for that. I've seen "check your privilege at the door", which means 3. I think in practice that means "speak softly/slowly/less in this space". I know it's often used in the sense of "check yourself", which is a combination of 1 and 2: i.e., think about how your privilege has just caused you to start stepping on people's feet, and try not to continue in that vein.

That said, I usually make my own requests far more specific. I've seen that happen too: someone explains what people do wrong, and then says "people who do this, check your privilege"--i.e. realize it's privilege making you do this, and stop it, so that extends slightly outside of the usual meaning.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I think I tend to assume that it means all three when I encounter it, but I don't use it really myself, so I don't have brilliant intuitions. Is this a case of semantic underspecification? It seems as though if you were to attempt to do something vaguely formal with it, that might be what you ended up with.

[dr_whom]

"Audit your privilege" does point toward 1, but as pastwatcher points out, "check your privilege at the door" is also attested and is almost unambiguously 3. Though your point about "can't leave our privilege behind" is a good one.

I think this is pretty interesting from a linguistic point of view—the same set of phonological words arrive at the same resulting pragmatic speech act even though it goes undetectably through one of three very different semantic meanings.

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

It means all three! Like, "Check yo self before you wreck yo self." :D

[khyros.livejournal.com]

lowellboyslash's example is what I would have provided as illustrative of the meaning as I understand it. Emphasis on 1&2 in most contexts as I've encountered it.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

The meanings of the three senses of "check" here are not dissimilar from each other, all things considered -- they're quite distinct, but also clearly related -- so I don't think you'd want to argue that they were homophones. It's something going on with senses. Back when I was doing word-sense disambiguation, I used to encounter with some frequency cases where it was really hard to tell which of several senses of a verb (in particular) were intended, even from context. The meaning of the overall collocation wasn't necessarily affected. One could presumably make up some sort of story about semantic underspecification and neutralisation in some contexts. What interests me about this case is that this is an idiom, not a one-off; does that mean that the semantics of the idiom itself are underspecified?

Though your point about "can't leave our privilege behind" is a good one.

The way I've interpreted this -- which could be totally wrong, given that this isn't an idiom I use myself -- has been that you're meant to forget about your own perspective entirely and concentrate on the other people's perspectives, putting yourself in their shoes, as it were, so that you can feel for a moment what it's like to be the other person, rather than interpreting what they're saying through the lens of your own experience, which is biased by your privileges.

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

I've seen "check your privilege at the door", but always understood it as a sort of clever repurposing for 3 of a phrase that originally meant 1. And I think that to the extent people mean 2, it can only be accomplished by means of 1 anyway. That is: if you're going to try to limit the influence of your privilege on whatever it is you're doing, you have to be aware of that privilege and be vigilant for where it shows up. And I agree with those who have said that 3 is not really possible, at least on an individual, interpersonal level, which is where people usually use this phrase.

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

Oh. Also, I agree that LBS's example is highly relevant. Which I guess makes me more amenable to this "1 or 2" or "hybrid of 1 and 2" point of view, since "check yourself before you wreck yourself" always seems to me to mean something like "stop what you're doing and think about it, then do a different thing".

[dr_whom]

I kind of want to label this a marginal case of a type of microparametric variation—something about other speakers' underlying representation of the phrase isn't reconstructible from the surface manifestation, so each learner is free to reach their own interpretation of it.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Ja. I wonder how many of these there are? Probably more than anyone realises.

[dr_whom]

Most likely, since they're all about not realizing them.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I do wish that there were some means of finding these other than happening to notice the odd example, you know?

[dr_whom]

Indeed!