Lizzo, In Context

We are all afraid of not being accepted because of something we’ve said, or thought, or done. 

This basic human fear, which explains the aggrieved response of many who have physical and verbal disabilities to Lizzo’s use of the word ‘spaz’ in her latest song GRRLS, is also, paradoxically, the fear that drives some to question that kind of a response in the first place. 

Many with disabilities have been tormented with the word ‘spaz’ dripping from the lips of high school bullies who refused to accept them and welcome them in. And coming from teens who are often merciless, this can be particularly painful. But this was not the context for Lizzo’s use of the term, and analyzing behavior without paying attention to the context is also a failure of acceptance.

When you think of the word acceptance, what comes to mind? For me, (and at least one dictionary definition confirms this), acceptance conjure up a spatial metaphor, meaning “to receive” or, cognitively speaking, “to comprehend.” Context provides the container through which a person can comprehend. Context is defined as “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.” Context is the boundary in which something can be grasped. Without it (a container), the act of acceptance (receiving) becomes not only impossible, but incoherent.

Now acceptance doesn’t mean moral sanction or idealization. I can accept someone and ask them to change parts of their behavior. But the way I respond to their behavior in the first place will depend upon the context from which it emerged.  Context doesn’t change an action itself but determines the meaning behind an action.  

This is especially useful for me when I think of Lizzo’s song.  After all, no one had a problem with Lizzo referring to girls as bitches and hoes or insinuating that she would violently cut a man’s penis off, Lorena Bobbitt style, in the same song. That’s because we knew the context in which Lizzo was describing  female empowerment: playfully, non-literally, metaphorically. We understood that she wasn’t calling for literal violence, and even if like me, you think that last metaphor is particularly brutal, you still know it’s a metaphor; Lizzo had no intention of trivializing Lorena Bobbit’s experience of abuse at the hands of her husband, nor is she belittling men who have been victims of domestic abuse. Nor was she making light of the turmoils of a community impacted by bullying when she said she was going to “spaz out.” Either it’s all a metaphor or none of it is.

A society that does not honor context will confuse what is figurative for what is literal and become puritanical in the process. I am not exaggerating. Despite some of its deeper truths, Protestantism, one of the foundational doctrines of the USA has always been hamstrung by its context-less cognitive structure, with its literal reading of Christianity over a more symbolic one, and its Calvinistic declaration that “meaning is independent of form.”  In a world without metaphor, words become self-referential, no longer pointing to other ideas but turned into idols. Some are good, some are bad, and like bad statutes, the bad words must be taken down. 

In ‘The Master & His Emissary,’ Iain McGilchrist points out that the inability to read context was one of the major distinctions of the Protestant Reformation, in contrast to the Renaissance. The former emphasized “…the literal meaning in language over metaphorical meaning…the tendency towards abstraction…an attack on music, the deliberate attempt to do away with…the contextually modulated, implicit wisdom of a tradition…and an attack on the sacred that was vehement in the extreme, and involved repeated and violent acts of desecration.” 

My approval or disapproval of certain words here is not the point. There are plenty of words, phrases, rejoinders, and slurs I don’t like using or hearing, and there are plenty of comedians and podcasters who use words in ways I never would. But what matters here is the principle of the thing: Words can point to multiple meanings given the varied contexts from which they arise, and given the richness of the human experience. The best artists use words — yes, even derogatory ones — to point to universal truths about the human condition. So, for example, when Anna and Dasha from the Red Scare podcast (my absolute fave) use the dreaded “retarded” slur to refer to ideas and themselves, I cringe and laugh because in that context, the word is simultaneously a taunt and a warm reception, an acknowledgment that all of us are in fact retarded in some way, shape, or form. This is precisely how Lizzo uses the terms ‘bitch’ and ‘spaz.’ The double meaning is the point, and the opening for a deeper human connection.

 That is what context does: It reveals the multiplicity of meaning in content. Just as Riley in Inside Out discovered that feelings of happiness and sadness can co-exist in the same experience, so too can a word signify multiple things. And if we dispense with context entirely and pretend it doesn’t exist, we will be one step closer in erasing the connective tissues that bind us together as humans. Without context, there can be no poetry, no hip hop, no double entendres and no comedy. There can be no music, and I’ll be damned if I have to live in a world without music. And so will you.