terms of endearment

Music: Rolling Stones: Some Girls (1978)

I was saying goodbye to a friend, a former teaching assistant and a current graduate student, some years my senior, in most ways wiser and with knocks harder than I can imagine. Second career. She was putting on a helmet and mounting a scooter. “Thanks Josh,” she said, referencing our working lunch meeting. “Thank you for lunch, darlin’” I said, almost automatically. I noticed, in that split second, the “darlin’” was unwittingly testing a boundary. She registered, made eye contact, then cracked a smile. “You bet, babe.” And off she scooted.

Unspoken negotiation happens daily, in gesture and mood; words spoken only index a torrent of scripts churning out behind observing eyes. That is, the speakers who are seasoned at self-monitoring scan the scripts, quickly.

I think culture shock has its advantages. I was born and raised in Georgia. Lived in DC. Moved to the Midwest. Moved to Louisiana. Then moved to Texas. Shocking every year of the way.

It’s taken me a long time, but I have finally come back around to occupying a speech orientation, a sort of idiomatic disposition, that I was reared into as a son of Georgia: relating to others with terms of endearment. Growing up, I was called “dear,” “sweetie,” “darlin’,” and all matter of cute names that are so stereotypical of being a kid from the south. When I moved away from “Dixie,” it was initially difficult adjusting to being addressed a “sir” or “mister” at the grocery store. But I acclimated, eventually. When I moved to Minnesota in my early twenties, I learned that referring to others as “sweetie” and “darlin’” could be taken as an insult. And much of the reason concerned gender relations.

Graduate school, a deepening (and I think fairly extensive) education in the history of misogyny and sexism, and a certain midwestern sense of propriety oriented my whole being toward a certain comportment, a concern with the respect and dignity of others. In Minnesota, if I wanted to call a friend by “sweetie” or “dear,” I knew that it might be heard as an assertion of superiority or patriarchical right---so I simply stopped referring to people in that language. Over the course of six years, my body acquiesced. Calling others by the southern terms of endearment simply left my vocabulary; “dude” entered my vocabulary as a sort-of substitute (for men and women with whom I was close; I think my Dixie-diction just got Cali-clobbered---in Minnesota!).

What I learned in graduate school is that calling others “sweetheart” or “darlin’” was at some level an assertion of power, drawing on a logic that stretched back decades, perhaps centuries. What seems like an innocent admission of affection is really an assertion, for example, of male superiority over women, or an assertion of male privilege, or a tacit reminder of my (assumed) power, or so on. We’re all familiar with the arguments (well, most of the folks who read this blog, anyway). What I’m trying to write about is how irresistible those habits are, how throwing out those terms of endearment are so soul-deep, so unconscious, how the gestures are learned so early that they are as much a form of dancing as they are a perpetuation of a kind of ideological perseveration (think Lacan on the agency of the letter, here).

For example: there’s another thing that I was taught as a young person that I simply cannot seem to shake: holding doors open for others behind me who are elderly or women (we’ll, frankly, I do this for just about everyone). I was taught at a very young age---before I can consciously remember---to do this. And I was taught to make sure the elderly and women exit elevators before I do. I’ve tried to break this habit, but I can’t. I still do it. Unfailingly. I can recall thinking just last week: I was standing at the front of a crowded elevator car going up to the seventh floor, and a number of young, female students were behind me, and I thought that I should let them exit before I do. I recall thinking also that maybe I should just walk out of the elevator first, because waiting represented a certain male superiority. But when the door opened, I used my arm to hold open the door and let the women out before I got out. Force of habit. Force of entrainment.

Is the force of habit also the force of hegemony? Probably.

But I also think, increasingly, the force of habit is alright, that my graduate school self is being too hard on my middle-aged self reverting to adolescent habit.

As my opening anecdote reveals, I’ve started letting myself use terms of endearment for people. No doubt that’s because I live in a state for which this is common and expected; clerks at the grocery store call me “darlin’” (usually women), and I like it. My closest friends do it (Dale calls me “babe,” Mirko calls me “buddy,” Shaun tells me “I love you, bud” at the end of every phone call, Diane calls me “sweetie”). But I’m trying to be mindful about it. I want the folks whom I call “sweetie” or “darlin’” to know that my terms of endearment are deployed carefully, with the full knowledge that there’s a complicated power structure I’m navigating when address them so, that I’m aware of this structure, and that I do it anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I call you “sweetie,” you should know that I’m not necessarily on some hegemonic autopilot, or asserting some sort of power relation, but rather that I love you.

But is it the hegemonic speaking through me? Perhaps. At some level. I guess at this point I’m willing to take the risk, darlin’. And that I think the nature of the risk is more endearing than oppressive.

This is the sort of “over-thinking” that academics are made-fun of for, that my own family teases me about. Still, it’s an interesting, everyday gesture that bespeaks an intellectual journey few of those who have not had an education in feminism and gender studies think about. But if I call you “darlin’,” rest assured I have thought about the implications (I think?). And, I hope, you realize I’ve taken risk---the risk that I know all that and still want to risk it, that you are my equal, and that you are truly dear to me.

But: This is why I only will use such terms of endearment with those who are dear to me and know me---because I suppose that they know where it’s coming from. And at some level I think I assume those for whom I use such terms of endearment would tell me that they find it offensive if they actually find it offensive. In which case, I guess, I would just call them “dude”---regardless of gender, or, well, religious conviction.