Lampshading Social Justice; Or, How I Became a Social Justice Necromancer

‘Social Justice blogging’ is a bad word in internet culture. Discerning bloggers, lurkers, and meme-propagators tend to cringe at the label of ‘social justice warrior’ as it’s applied to their internet works. It’s pejorative, critical, negative, and it’s a sign of someone who rushes into an internet discussion and stirs up trouble, someone who takes perfectly acceptable fandoms, cultural events, and media, and messes it up by calling out the problematic aspects of those areas.

Blogger and tumblr user that I am, I too avoid the SJW label. I know the negative connotations, even if I disagree with their application. The problem is, I LIKE blogging about problematic aspects of fandom, culture, and media. I’m a rhetoritician, I teach argumentation for a living, and I’m getting at least two more degrees in it, so it’s more than just my bread and butter.

Give a name to something, it creates a label for it, and that label makes assumptions. I call myself a Social Justice Warrior, and I get scorn from some, and immediate judgment from others. If your blog is a social justice blog, you must be irrational, easy to rouse into anger, and obnoxious.

A friend of mine, Sylver, made a clever joke on tumblr a couple of weeks ago. Someone sent them an ask inquiring as to whether or not they considered themselves an SJW. Sylver jokingly responded that they considered themselves more of a Social Justice Cleric, as opposed to a Warrior. Where warriors run in and do battle, clerics stand behind, providing heal spells, buff spells, and the occasional assist in battle.

I love a D&D joke as much as the next nerd, and that got me thinking about ways to support the idea of social justice blogging while finding a way to hang a lampshade on those who reject the naming of such bloggers as social justice warriors.

The best way to change a pejorative label is to adapt to it, to change it, and take away its power. I combined this belief with my own SJ-related blogging tactics, which involved careful tactical argumentation, relentlessly resurrecting dead points and using them until they were parsed out, and helping people admit that SJ blogging is actually a useful tool in the forum of social interrogation of problematic media.

And so, in brief, that’s how I accidentally became a social justice necromancer.