judith butler, baby, my car can be driven by you
Guest post by sophiamason. CW: includes discussion of language used to describe sexual violence)
What do general Conference talks, Judith Butler manuscripts, and social activism memes have in common? Well, quite a few things (they’re all text-based, they start fights with your in-laws), but more importantly to the (at least) two-hundred year-old tradition of arguing that language matters, they all frequently use passive voice. Now, having just graduated from a college facing its own rampant Title IX abuses like BYU faces currently, I see this issue as also integral to how we discuss social ills and how our language shapes our reactions.
I had to ask for help with passive voice myself to get this far here, so for those of us who have survived high-school to mentally block it, passive voice describes a scenario where the subject of the sentence does not perform the action in the sentence. For instance, in the active voice construction, “I wore a yellow pair of pants”, I is the subject, and I does something. It wears a pair of pants. In passive voice that sentence looks like this, “the yellow pants were worn {by me}”. Here the pants are the subject of the sentence, but they do not perform the action that the sentence describes. Me actually does the wearing. The sentence structure here confuses the pants with the active party. I WEAR THE YELLOW PANTS AROUND HERE AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!
In a novel about a parasitic yellow pair of pants, this construction might be elegant and effective. In that scenario the acting party actually is ambiguous, like the sentence structure (is the person in control, or are the pants?). William Strunk Jr. and beloved writer E. B. White explain that the command “ ‘Use the active voice’…does not mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary”. Judith Butler, Deiter F. Uchtdorf, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. all use this method expertly. But like any tactic, sometimes we use them in not so careful or caring ways.
Example time: Let’s look at what passive voice does to victims of sexual assault in this meme:
{The meme shows two light blue stick figure women side by side, one with dark blue rising from her feet into the hem of her skirt, and the second woman with blue rising just below her skirt. The text relates, “20% of women are sexually assaulted on college campuses. 12% of those women report it to universities or police.”}
These statistics display relatively accurate information as far as I am aware, but passive voice in the first statistic presents a subject which does not perform an action. So it becomes a meme about an action and an object, but one which leaves out discussion of an acting subject. This focuses all of our reading attention on women who are assaulted, and takes our eyes off of those people and social environments that assault.[i] This contributes to the line of thinking that follows with, “huh, I wonder what these women have in common…maybe they dress promiscuously…” and so forth, and keeps us from recognizing more logical causes.
Let’s look at one more example of passive voice before I present some alternatives:
The quote I am interested in is, “Brigham Young University made national headlines this month when it was revealed [by someone] that female students who reported being raped {by assaulters} could be suspended or expelled [by another vague someone] for violating the school’s onerous honor code”.{This is a screen shot of Dahlia Lithwik’s Slate.com article about BYU’s Sexual assault and Honor Code petition with an aerial photograph of BYU campus and the following text, “Brigham Young University made national headlines this month when it was revealed that female students who reported being raped could be suspended or expelled for violating the school’s onerous honor code. The details of the case are infuriating. Whether or not the school is technically in violation of Title IX remains to be seen, but the school is clearly violating the spirit of the law in a way that does untold damage to rape survivors and makes future rapes more likely.”}[ii]
The third instance of passive voice in this sentence makes it seem like expulsion just naturally happens, like gravity, while we all know boards and committees and people expel other people. Passive voice can let us tiptoe around identifying the party which harms another human being or the party that refuses to halt harm coming to others. In addition, the first instance of passive voice gives up an opportunity to champion those who finally did something about blatant contradictions in what BYU says it does and what BYU actually does. It glosses over the students who set their education on the line, the people who listened and who made crucial phone calls, and the professionals who have built (and used) influential networks with New York Times editors. (See what I did there? I used active voice). The second instance of passive voice simply duplicates the issue I already discussed in that it fails to implicate the people who assault.[iii]
The trick to making a passive voice construction into an active construction is asking the question, “who is acting?” while we write. This can be a pretty difficult question to answer when it comes to social injustices because so many different factors contribute, but this valuable exercise nonetheless helps us think through what force we specifically want to pinpoint, or identify who a piece of writing leaves out.
Here is what active voice can look like:
While this meme is NOT about sexual assault, it does use active voice (except for that last line), and almost magically reveals a segment of society we rarely address in statistics about births to young women. Now, granted, this one gives us passive voice in its last sentence, but in active voice it could read as: “…but we repeatedly present teen mothers as the problem.” We get implicated for our act of injustice and undue blame does not get dumped onto the subject that had not acted in the passive voice version.{This meme states: DID YOU KNOW? Men between the ages of 20 and 29.7 father 39% of the children born to teen moms, age 15. That means grown men father a large percent of children born to teens but teen mothers are represented as the problem.}[iv]
My concern with passive voice does not end with rape culture or careful writing though. One of my favorite discoveries while contemplating this comes from a post on the Ordain Women blog , in which Natasha Smith, chair of the intersectionality committee, eloquently calls out passive voice bull that (many) LDS have let infest our doctrine and corrupt our self governance. She states,
I want the common retort “They were influenced by the teachings of their time” to no longer be seen {by us} as a justifiable excuse for the policies and doctrines implemented by past and present leaders. I want to walk into church and stand confidently knowing that everyone else believes that we are all created equal and have been since the beginning of time (emphasis added).
Right?! I have a hard time believing Elder Holland should feel comfortable with idea, that the teachings of their time(s!) influenced the racist and unrighteous doctrines that a succession of the highest authorities of the church insisted on for more than one-hundred years, especially considering that “sin” infuriates him.[v] “Influence”? That is not even a strong concept. It’s just influence. Do we really think that “influence” excuses Brigham Young from his vehement racism when the army of the United States had quite a time “influencing” him to run his territory differently than he wanted to, and the government could not “influence” him enough to pay Ann Eliza Webb the alimony he owed her.[vi] Harold B. Lee? We feel hunky-dory saying saying a bunch of nameless non-LDS Americans and mormons influenced his way of biding his time until someone else had the courage to end the covenantal ban for people of African descent?[vii] Please.
American Mormonism used to champion education, and it still has a healthy tradition of powerful rhetoric and literacy that we can adopt and adapt for good. Today many of us still speak publicly to congregations, classes, one another, and communities beyond LDS ones. We write on a myriad of blogs and construct pithy captions when we share knowledge incessantly on social media. I call for us to wield active voice for social activism topics, or at least for us to recognize the rhetorical tools we have and use them purposefully.
I stay mormon some days because I know that words can upset grave injustices, and words are free (or at least affordable for most). My bosom still burns when I see that the pen continues to out-mighty the sword. The pen just needs a little editing once in a while.
[i] Both of the following statistics come from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center: It is estimated that the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions may be between 20% and 25% over the course of a college career. Less than 5% of completed or attempted rapes against college women were reported to law enforcement. However, in 2/3rds of the incidents the victim did tell another person, usually a friend, not family or school officials. I do not have a citation for the original meme.
[ii] Dahlia Lithwick, “Repeated Violations,” Slate, April 27, 2016, accessed June 4, 2016.
[iii] I love Dahlia Lithwick’s article about BYU’s Honor code, but in sticking to the passive voice laden prose of journalism, she forfeits many opportunities to deal hard blows to the the activity of assaulting, BYU, Title IX, and the Utah Valley police departments involved in this story.
[iv] Gloria Malone, “Teen Mom NYC: A blog by a teen mom for teen moms,” last updated May 24, 2016.
[v] David Mason, “Don’t Stay in the Boat: The Sea of Mormon Stories” Aestheism, Patheos, May 9, 2016, accessed June 4, 2016, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/aestheism/2016/05/dont-stay-in-the-boat-the-sea-of-mormon-stories/
[vi] Regarding the United States Army: David Vaughn Mason, Brigham Young: Sovereign in America. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 107. Regarding Ann Eliza Young Webb’s alimony: Mason, Brigham Young, 126.
[vii] Mark Brown, “David O. McKay and the Priesthood Ban,” By Common Consent, December 4, 2009, accessed June 4, 2016.
Young Mormon Feminists 
One Response to “judith butler, baby, my car can be driven by you”
1 in 4 is blatantly false statistic that hurts the fight against rape more than it helps it. We don’t need to exaggerate. The facts are bad enough as it is.