Folx meaning urban dictionary3/28/2023 ![]() ![]() And in the 1970s and 80s some feminists adopted variant spellings of ‘woman’ and ‘women’-including ‘womon’, ‘womyn’, ‘wombyn’ and ‘wimmin’-that were designed to get rid of the ‘man/men’ part, and so convey the idea that women are not just extensions or appendages of men. In the 1960s and 70s leftist counter-culture types sometimes wrote ‘Amerika’ or ‘Amerikkka’ to convey the idea that the US was a fascist and racist state. Re-spelling words to make a political point is not a new strategy. But at the same time it’s part of a longer history of attempts to change the way gender is marked linguistically, and has a complicated relationship with earlier feminist interventions. ![]() That isn’t the only thing that makes it a sign of the times: it also reflects the primacy of digital media and the written word, and the transnational or global nature of contemporary political communication. The Olympia YWCA’s ‘Womxn of Achievement’ awards, for instance, are open to ‘two-Spirit, gender non-binary and queer folks’ as well as women. The letter X in ‘womxn’, also found in ‘Latinx’, ‘folx’ and the title ‘Mx’, has become an orthographic symbol of gender-inclusiveness, signalling that the term it appears in addresses or refers to people of all gender identities (though ‘womxn’ is a partial exception to that rule, in that it does exclude people who identify as men). These questions take us back to something I’ve discussed in a couple of recent posts: the contested concept of ‘inclusive language’. But what were they thinking when they originally chose to write ‘womxn’? And why did that choice provoke resistance? ‘We invite challenges to our thinking’, they tweeted, ‘and we listen to our audience’. Nevertheless, Wellcome got so many complaints that they eventually removed the contentious X. ‘Womxn’ has been around for a while in activist circles: there are various Womxn’s Marches, the Olympia YWCA in Washington State runs a ‘Womxn of Achievement’ award, and the UK organisation Her Stories recently announced an art auction to benefit refugee and migrant womxn. Earlier this month there was controversy after the Wellcome Collection, a museum in London, used the word ‘womxn’ in its publicity for an upcoming event. ![]()
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