Engender blog

F-words: Language and gender in board games

Jenny Lester is a feminist writer and performer. She currently works at Equate Scotland, and has previously worked in women’s rights organisations and mental health charities. She completed an MA in Women’s Studies researching sex education, pleasure, and faking orgasms. She is a board game and TTRPG enthusiast and is passionate about bringing feminism into these spaces.

Board games are a piece of media that I hold close to my heart. I love playing them, reading about them, and buying them. But, like all media, they exist within our culture so, in turn, display our culture back to us. This means they often show back sexism and inequality. One of the ways we can see the patriarchy within this space is by looking at the language used in the rule books of the games we are playing. For the F-word's blog series, I set out to investigate the language in the rule books of all 25 board games that I own.

F-words: the language of abortion

Dr Carrie Purcell is a Research Fellow in the Complexity in Health Improvement Programme, at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow. Carrie also leads the Sexuality and Abortion Stigma Study (SASS).

Head to Twitter to follow Carrie and the SASS project.

As a sociologist, and a researcher who works on abortion, I spend a lot of time thinking about the language that’s used around abortion in everyday, medical, academic, media and advocacy contexts. This blog presents some of my reflections on that language.

F-words: Writing ourselves into existence

Raman Mundair is an Indian born, Queer, British Asian writer, artist, photographer and film maker. In this contribution to our F-words series, Raman explores the power that words can have in giving voice to experiences and identities so often ignored.

Follow Raman on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (@ramanmundair & @rmundair), and listen to her 'intersectional voices' work at Anchor.fm.

Content note: this article discusses racism, childhood abuse, and victim-blaming.

I recently read an article by Professor Lena Karlsson - 'Towards a language of sexual gray zones: feminist collective knowledge building through autobiographical multimedia storytelling' - which led me to consider that beyond the infinite shades of grey lies a rainbow of Black and brown women's stories that never get to breathe and take up space, not even in the constant hum of social media. These are doubly marginalised voices from within the grey spaces women can inhabit or are pushed into - Black and brown women's perspectives which are ignored, spoken over, co-opted or drowned out. A whole lexicon of lived experience wilfully erased.

F-words: language's influence on body image

The YWCA Scotland - The Young Women's Movement are currently running a digital campaign which aims to open conversations about young women's body image and explores new ways of looking at, thinking about and talking about our bodies. We asked their Programmes Coordinator Elena Soper and Digital Officer Amy King to blog for us on the links between language and bodies. Check out #EatYourWords here and follow the YWCA Scotland Young Women's Movement on Twitter and Instagram.

Why words matter

When you heard at school that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”, they were wrong. We don’t even need to recognise an exchange as traumatic at the time for it to have an impact – many we don’t consciously remember are still with us, and they shape how we view ourselves.

Words bolster our actions, thoughts and feelings. Words have the power to diminish our confidence, and to belittle us. Words proved integral to shaping young women’s body image when we asked them how they feel about their own bodies.