on (against) plain language

When Kimberlé Crenshaw first developed "intersectionality", she intended it as a metaphor. She articulates this very clearly in her 1989 paper: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.” Where Racism Street meets Sexism Avenue, vehicles crumpling into each other, a collision over too quickly and chaotically to assign blame: such is the life of Black women in the US.

Various scholars have since riffed on this representation of power and oppression.
What if, given our varying levels of privilege and disadvantage, the roads also wind around mountains and through valleys?¹ What about the constant near-misses that we'll never hear about; the minor scrapes and dents that nevertheless might leave us feeling shaken?² We like being able to rely on metaphor as a communicative device. Power is abstract, invisible; rugged terrain and roundabouts are far more worldly and familiar. As Patricia Hill Collins points out, this is a key dimension of intersectionality's wide-ranging legacy, its appeal: it uses something material, tangible, to make Black women’s experiences of discrimination recognisable to a wider audience.³

It's perhaps rather ironic, then, that intersectionality is accused of being jargon, a stuffy term, unwieldy in the mouth. It is, I am told, a bookish concept only for the intellectual elite — out-of-touch academics who don’t really understand the real world. "It's a useful idea," a fellow public servant tells me. "If only we had a snappier word!"

Government loves its short-hands; its acronyms. Consider the ever-contentious CALD, or even the similarly problematic ATSI. Behind the veil, we endure MOGs (“machinery-of-government” changes) and write corro ("correspondence", such as letters and emails, on behalf of Ministers) and review Cab subs (Cabinet submissions). We don't have time to spell things out in full. In fact, nor do we have the space — not when the brief template is just two pages, plus the important stuff has to fit into the first one.

By space, I also mean cognitive space. It's fairly uncommon to have a Minister with a PhD relevant to the policy area they are responsible for, so the advice that is dished up for them must be palatable, digestible. Public servants are often generalists rather than specialists, too, so it’s risky to depend on specialised terms that colleagues will need to pause to understand. Hence, the call for plain language: intersectionality is alienating, inaccessible otherwise. Let's just say, uh, “multiple types of disadvantage”. Let’s stick to “inclusive policy”. Let’s talk about identity in terms of “wearing many different hats”, discrimination as “layering”. It’s a simple concept, after all — so why the complex term?

My favourite thing about doing a PhD is how people now expect me to be able to roll a definition of intersectionality off my tongue, easy-peasy — when, really, I have become the person least capable of doing so. Research is the art of curiosity, of asking questions that only lead to more questions, of undoing rather than finding answers. Simply put: the more I study, the less I know.

When one of my research co-participants⁴ makes the off-hand remark that intersectionality is simple, once you get past the fancy term, I can’t help but feel amused. My Zotero library begs to differ! So, too, would the many political scientists and philosophers and critical theorists who continue to debate whether intersectionality relates to structures or identities; what it even means to intersect (like, does that mean race discrimination and sex discrimination are still, at times, separate things — or are they always entwined?); whether it still implies (problematically) that humans fit into boxes (even if the boxes get tangled up with each other). Intersectionality is absolutely related to simple ideas, and realities that we live and know in our bones — but it is also a pretty specific academic concept.

Sometimes we make up terms for the hell of it, I’m sure. I’ll also be the first to confess: I occasionally lean on big, flowery words to sound extra smart inordinately erudite. Lots has been written about the downsides of jargonistic writing in and beyond academia, and language as power, and epistemic injustice (and yes, even now, I’m using fancy words when I could probably just reframe). I totally agree: often, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick?

In the midst of this, though, we seem to have forgotten that jargon has a crucial function. Jargon allows experts in a given area of study to be precise; reckon with and acknowledge complex and potentially not-yet-decipherable events, questions, processes, ideas or phenomena. In fact, jargon is about keeping things simple — its purpose is to make it possible for thinkers to convey a variety of meanings, or refer to a series of issues, using just a few specialist terms. Without my fancy words, I don’t have the cognitive infrastructure to do my fancy thinking,

Sometimes, the writing is dense because the insights are dense.

Don’t get me wrong — I believe very, very strongly in the democratisation of knowledge. I am committed to knowledge translation, and making research widely available for different audiences. I'm fluent in bureaucratese and will happily (okay, grudgingly) pull together some research summaries in the form of policy briefs. I may even turn bits of my thesis into a couple of memes. I recognise myself as sitting at the nexus of a bunch of different sectors and thus, in a unique position to be an interpreter,

and yet, I also think we’ve totally perverted the value of plain language, and stretched it too far. Yes, we should ensure policy documents for the public include Easy English versions; government communications should be, at most, Hemingway Grade 8; audiovisual and social media should be leveraged to get messages out to laypeople. Equally, however — I think we sometimes misunderstand barriers to engagement. We assume certain population groups or communities are universally Too Stupid to Read or Comprehend, and that is why they aren’t downloading the four-year strategy that we’ve just released (lol). We make a big deal out of producing a PDF with graphics and diagrams and dot points, whilst doing absolutely nothing in terms of meeting with community members, demonstrating interest in their lives and neighbourhoods, and actually following through on the promises that we’ve laid out so clearly.

I’m also concerned about demands for plain language that seem to miss that knowledge sharing and generation and dissemination requires, and deserves, hard work. It doesn’t bother me if we need to find a simpler word for intersectionality to be able to communicate some fundamental ideas about discrimination and inequality to the general public. It does when it is practitioners who claim to be leaders in their fields, or policy analysts who are crafting the bones of a government intervention that holds immense potential of harm, because

it’s usually not really the word that is getting simplified, but the rich body of theoretical innovation and practice-based insights that it stands for. It is the cover-up of a metaphor that already goes a long way as a sense-making tool, as well as the litany of experiences, debates, examples and questions that Crenshaw’s work has built on and prompted since. It is the softening of the gnarly and deeply uncomfortable concerns about power that Black feminists, and many other feminists of colour, are still compelling us to confront.

Many folks only really need the Sparknotes version of intersectionality. Many folks, however, just don’t want to do their assigned readings. They want an efficient pathway towards expertise. They want to understand it after the one skim.⁵

I loathe to imply that we should gatekeep knowledge, particularly given who I am: a Nerd whose access to education has always been soundly protected. However, if we’ve decided, at first glance, that intersectionality is an unnecessarily complex word for a simple idea about complexity, then we’re probably not even ready to start to understand.

Honestly? I also just like playing with words,

the joy of writing as a craft, and thus the liberty to experiment with vocabulary and sentence construction and paragraphing, and tease out

new, unexpected forms of expression.

I like my semi-colons and em-dashes, the way they are notches in the too-long sentences that emulate my anxious streams of consciousness; the harried rhythms they can beat out of me. I like flirting with lexical choice and alliteration and rhyme, to create movement and colour and variety — aurally and visually. I like metaphor even though I admittedly fall, often, into cliché. Fuck, I occasionally just enjoy being wildly pretentious.

Sure. It is navel-gazing (solipsistic! myopic! self-absorbed! blinkered!) when writers fixate upon (pedestalise! foreground!) themselves as readers, and model their work on their own preferences and tastes. It may be hubris to assume that your audience will find your writing as pleasing as you do. In many cases, it’s likely self-sabotaging to create such friction, dress up your ideas to the point where they can no longer be discerned beneath all those layers. And yet,

I am confident that I can remain comprehensible, to those who are interested in comprehending, without being plain. And besides, legibility is not always my priority.

Confession. I’ve written all this in a panic, firstly, because I am now well and truly in the writing stage of writing a thesis (who knew it would be so difficult), and secondly, because I’ve been sitting on a seed of a side project for six months now, and I can’t decide / bring myself to press go.

In a nutshell — everyone and their mother gushes about intersectionality, and the urgency of ‘intersectional policymaking’, whilst also complaining about limited time, evidence, information. This is despite the good theory and practice that currently lives in academic journals, the baby steps that we could be taking whilst waiting for ‘intersectional policymaking’ to mature. Ergo: Intersectionality Compass, a little newsletter that does quick round-ups of the latest scholarly insights on all things intersectionality + policy, written up in exactly the way tired policymaker brains need?

Would love thoughts on the value of this. The selfish advantages are research visibility and influence and profile, metrics that are important for academic career development (which is only marginally important to me), as well as for the far nobler pursuit of getting knowledge out there to make a difference. The obvious disadvantage is the investment of my labour to accomplish something that generative AI can probably do (except, of course, I’m ideologically opposed to AI, but that’s a topic for another day). And finally,

The plain language qualm: I kind of hate the notion of doing the work of translation, of simplification, for people who just want quick fixes, shortcuts, and high-level insights. I miss subject matter expertise and the valuing of specialists over generalists. It is the reason why I’d rather offer an Intersectionality Compass (I’ll navigate, you do the trek yourself) than Intersectionality Bites (I’ll do all the clanging in the kitchen so that all you have to do is digest, piece by piece). And yet, even with this compromise, I can’t help but think — I don’t know if a shortage of useful resources is even the problem. I don’t know if it’s really just the lack of appetite to do the goddamn work.