Information Research Weblog

Political correcness seems to me a blunderbuss term of abuse which we need to rescue for a real political argument. The dominant force is the historic structure of society, which includes language, words, libraries, classification schemes, controlled vocabularies and taxonomies (though a remarkable number of commentators stop at words :)).

This force oppressed women, etc. etc therefore when the oppressed attempt their own liberation this includes the language, words, libraries, and their instruments of knowledge organisation.

The dark forces attempting to prevent this liberation then defend their social constructions as "human nature", "free will", "natural language" and attempt to regain territory by the abuse of assertions of difference. Political correctness is one such term. Gender and sex, sexuality, female, feminine, femininity is one such thread.

Not for a moment am I suggesting Tom Wilson, Edward Dudley, Blaise Cronin or any other of the valient strugglers for free speech, the right to know, access to information or freedom of expression are falling into political uncorrectedness or unpolitical (therefore can be neither correct nor incorrect); but that we shouldn't give an inch.

It is politically correct to assert the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary are institutionally sexist, as I think an entertaining article in a recent Archivist did and it is not political correctness to object. Sex and gender are endlessby bending terms and I think the argument depends on the context?

But we did cover all this thirty years ago.