The NUS Women’s Conference has caused a bit of a stir on twitter recently. The conference could well have gone unnoticed as many of these things do except they were using Twitter as though it were a private forum and made this rather ill-judged tweet:
Which is on the face of it a bit silly – to say the least. Giving the people who made the request every benefit of the doubt, some people do find large noisy crowds stressful and if someone is experiencing discomfort near you – you should probably check that they’re OK. That said if you find noisy crowds and clapping stressful, it’s probably something you could expect to experience at a conference and you might do well to prepare for it yourself and take responsibility for your own well-being and thus empower your self (as the cool kids say). Some people supportive of this request suggested that “Jazz hands” were BSL for clapping, Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case. According to Sign BSL the sign for applause is to clap silently. Now that said deaf people do sometimes indicate applause by putting their hands in the air and waving them:
As explained quite nicely over at Yahoo answers. However it doesn’t really look that much like “Jazz hands” does it? If you wanted people to use the BSL sign you could maybe say so, or say just wave your hands?
The issue was of course compounded by the fact that the same conference that was proposing that people use “Jazz hands” to applaud, a term and action not without racial connotations:
, were also decrying the cultural appropriation of the mannerisms of “Black Women” by “gay men”:
So ignoring the lumping of all Black Women and Gay men into just two groups, we have the horribly amusing spectacle of a conference that is very aware of the importance of what terms you use and cultural appropriation telling people to use “Jazz hands”. A bit of awareness on their part would have avoided the tweet and subsequent ridicule in the first place – but what really ensured that the ridicule didn’t go away were the responses made by delegates at and supporters of the conference. A quick “oops that was thick” drama over but that wasn’t how they reacted resulting in the #nuswomen15 hashtag becoming subject to ever more ridicule as they kept digging deeper:
Which of course meant more ridicule and people looking at what else they were proposing such as :
and
. Even the BBC picked it up finding a NUS spokesperson to defend it, and continuing to ignore the racial connotations that would usually be jumped on if say someone like Mr Clarkson had done Jazz hands. Fortunately for our sanity BreitBart stepped in with a new lexicon of what various words now mean.
All joking aside, if you are an organisation that purports to reflect the views of a large body of people, in this case female students, and you make both your conference papers and discussions public you really do have to expect to engage with the greater public over what you’re saying. Especially when that greater public includes members of the group you want to represent but who aren’t at the conference – this is a good thing. Use the publicity to explain your position, that’s what you have press officers and such for, reach out to the people whose attention you now have – you never know there may be some points of common ground. Alternatively accuse everyone including your own members of misogyny and various “isms” and act like spoilt children putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “shut up, shut up, it’s not fair”. The choice is entirely yours but one is more likely than the other to be productive, once you’ve got the world’s attention you have to deal with it, make the most of it or invite further mockery entirely up to you.
