âDNI: freaksâ do you realize how conservative you look
freaks please interact
this is the first time one of my posts has been tagged like this and out of all of them i think id be glad if this one got 100k. because firstly i need to find my fellow freaks but also we need to shame people who are anti-freak because like. why do you hate to live deliciously
someone tagged multiple drawings of mine ft fat characters as “tw body image” i am entitled to compensation and im stealing shit out of your house right now
idk man what people ask you to tag on this website is not sacred and you should. employ critical thinking. like if someones asking for a trigger warning for an entire category of human being thats a nut up or shut up issue for them
I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. Itâs something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and itâs a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like thereâs different types of interruptive like thereâs constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then thereâs like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so Iâve def done the latter too by accident, but Iâm talking about being more accepting of the former.
I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. itâs always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they donât feel like they can call me out in same way). Like Iâve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and Iâve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isnât a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.
As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!
An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:
close latching â how much time should I give between when you stop talking and when I start? Very close latching can feature a lot of overlaps.
participatory listening â how do I signal to you that Iâm engaged with what youâre saying and paying attention? Do I make any noise at all, or do I limit myself to minimal âbackchannelâ noises (mm-hmm, ah, yeah), or do I fully verbalize my reactions as youâre going? Maybe even chime in along with you, if I anticipate what youâre about to say, to show how well weâre vibing?
support request â this can shade into interruption as a form of sealioning, but if someone interjects a request like âI didnât catch thatâ or âWhatâs that mean?â itâs not really an interruption, because theyâre not trying to end/take my turn away, theyâre inviting me to keep going with clarification/adaptation.
asides â if thereâs more than two people involved in a conversation, a certain amount of cross-talk is probably inevitable.
The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary â by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why itâs a feminist issue. But gender doesnât exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when theyâre not intended to be:
norms about turn latching: someone whoâs not used to close-latching conversation might feel interrupted or stepped on when talking to someone who is. The converse is that someone whoâs expecting close-latching might feel the absence of it as awkward silence, withdrawal, coldness, etc.
norms about backchannel: if youâre not expecting me to provide running commentary on your story or finish your sentences (or if Iâm doing it wrong) then you might feel interrupted. But if youâre expecting that level of feedback you might feel ignored.
neurodivergence: If I have auditory processing problems, I might take longer to respond to you than youâre expecting. If I have impulse control problems, I might blurt something out as soon as I think of it, but I donât necessarily want you to stop. If I have trouble with nonverbal or paralinguistic cues, I might not latch my turns the way you expect, or my backchannel might be timed in a way you donât expect.
Non-native speakers of a language may need more time to process speech; may speak more slowly and with pauses in different places than native speakers; may not pick up the same cues about turn-latching and backchannel, resulting in a timing difference; may need to make more requests for support.Â
Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who âhas the floorâ and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology â I thing the accountâs gone private, but someone recently tweeted, âFor the sake of my wifeâs family, Zoom needs to incorporate an âashkenazi jewishâ checkboxâ because the platform is programmed to try to identify a âmain speakerâ and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else weâd probably still be acting like Robertâs Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.
And itâs very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesnât mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesnât mean I have the right to scream âEVERYBODY SHUT UP!!â until Iâm the only one talking.
I donât ⊠have a great way to end this? Just that itâs good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.
Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesnât overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because Iâm waiting for them to interrupt and theyâre âpolitelyâ waiting for me to finish speaking.
Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I donât need to say the same thing over and over again lol
[IMAGE ID: the astral projection meme where a ghostly version of a person lying down is floating up from their body. The text reads: âleftism leaving peopleâs bodies as soon as a fat person existsâ /END ID]
