My Tumblr posts are not always very well thought out (well, not that my non Tumblr posts are, but that’s another topic altogether). I sometimes respond to comments on the fly and don’t necessarily flesh out style or proper paragraph breaks. My Tumblr posts sometimes contain typos or kinda broken grammar (especially if I am working with sources in a language other than English and translating them as I type). However, even though some of the posts can have a draft-like quality, I do consider the words I use. So, yesterday I vented about the European boycott over the Eurovision Song Festival. Now, I fully acknowledge that it wasn’t a ground breaking post or super meaningful or even all that original. It was written in a couple of minutes just to share immediacy, to express something that was relevant to yesterday’s news cycle.
In the post I used the expression “these Othered bodies” to refer to the way the EU deals with undocumented immigrants and internment camps. This wasn’t a typo. This wasn’t a mistake or something that I misused. This was fully intentional and central to my politics. So, when someone reblogs this post and changes the expression to “these other bodies”, they are actually changing the very basis of my politics. I know it is a trivial and a small issue, pretty inconsequential, etc. However, it is worth noting that these changes in meaning (which we cannot control) are also of a political nature. And I’d say not exactly free of ideology either.
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