‘Slay’ bells ring? A semi-seasonal post on the origins of the term ‘yas’.

This post responds to the Reply All podcast from the 7th of July 2016 entitled Disappeared. If you would like to listen to it first, the link is: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/. I will be focusing on the second half of the podcast from 19 minutes onward. However, the first half is an equally fascinating discussion about Left-Pad, Azer Koçulu, and opensource licensing of code, which I equally recommend that you listen to.

That being said, the second half explores the origins of the term ‘yas’, which is an incredibly popular way of expressing an intense appreciation for something or someone on the internet; any brief jaunt through Twitter, Tumblr, or potentially Facebook will undoubtedly return at least one use of it. For example (credit for all tweets given to the original account holders):

The tweet above appears to relate to the viral video that is credited with bringing ‘yas’ into popular culture, as is referenced in the Reply All podcast.

This tweet (above) is also interesting from an analysis perspective, and potentially offers an explanation for the popularity of the expression. It also engages with an interesting facet of drag culture as an exaggeration of stereotypes or gendered characteristics, as well as performed expressions of emotion.

There are even gifs of velociraptors from Jurassic World with ‘yas’ superimposed upon them:

Returning to the original usage, however, I myself have used ‘yas’ on Twitter multiple times in response to things I loved. However, quite shamefully, I had no idea of its etymology. The Reply All podcast informed me that it first appeared in Harlem in the 1980s as a part of ball culture – specifically drag balls. Here is the origin of my shame as one of the communities with which I identify most as a bisexual woman is the LGBTQIA+ community. Clearly, I need to widen my knowledge of LGBTQIA+ history beyond UK borders. Regardless, learning about ball culture, the related house families that took in young, queer Black and Latinx people, and hearing Jose Xtravaganza speak about his own experiences with the House of Xtravaganza (of which he is now the Father) was both enlightening and emotive. I later went on to watch Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which offers an intimate portrayal of multiple drag balls and speaks to numerous queens about their backgrounds and their experiences of being drag queens in New York City. It is an amazing and incredibly emotional documentary. It also expanded upon the Reply All podcast for me, in that the queens in Paris is Burning explain the meaning behind many more popular terms used at drag balls, almost all of which I have seen and heard used online today. I recommend that you watch the documentary for a better understanding than I can provide in a short blog post.

The main thing that irritates me about the popular culture usage of ‘yas’ and other drag terms is not the fact that they have been popularised, per se, but that they have been popularised at the expense of their cultural heritage. I have no problem with multitudes of people using these words, but they have no idea of the atmosphere in which they were birthed. The vast majority of people using these words don’t understand why the subculture from which they come came into being; they don’t appreciate the immense hardships that these groups of people faced, or the relief of the sense of belonging that using these words and understanding them within gay culture gave. They are now part of mass culture. It feels almost as if by absorbing and appropriating gay language, popular culture has subsumed gay subculture, taken what it wanted, and spat the gay people out as ‘still not accepted’. It doesn’t come from a place of welcoming acceptance of gay culture and inclusion of popular slang used by the gay community with knowledge of the words’ heritage; it just lifts the word and erases its past and present as a ‘gay’ word. Homophobic people, transphobic people, biphobic people – people who are just unnaccepting of any and all parts of queer life and the queer subculture use ‘yas’ both online and in real life.

It is ironic in a way that a word with a queer history exists in the mouths of people who would absolutely ‘gag’ – in the basic sense of the word – and wash away all traces of it if they knew it had been used to celebrate drag queens and positive queer youth culture. But it also just stings. Part of the balls in Harlem was a competition to see if people could ‘pass’ for a certain gender or social class: they played with normative culture, and now one of their celebratory words is normative culture, but without them. It is still used by queer subcultures online, but many of those people are equally as unaware of the origins of one of their most-used words as I was. I think the main thing that saddens me is just that the revival of a word into mass usage doesn’t necessarily mean that social or societal groups are progressing and diversifying, but almost that popular culture is continually homogenising history and subculture into a mulch of ‘accepted’ popular culture. Words are stolen, repurposed, or even used in the way in which they were originally intended, but by different groups of people that cast them as monochromatic.

Popularising gay culture and drag culture is in no way bad when it reflects a more positive attitude towards LGBTQIA+ people: this is incredibly necessary, and a wider occurence of positive attitudes towards queerness would save so many people so much pain. But I don’t feel like that’s what this is. For me, and in my experience, the success of ‘popular gay culture’ like Ru Paul’s Drag Race has been mostly down to a fetishization and exoticising of gay culture for a straight, cisgendered audience who want to ogle the exiled ‘different’ people and the way in which ‘they’ live. There are, of course, LGBTQIA+ people who adore Ru Paul and feel represented by it, but its encouragement of stereotypes and high-performance ‘gayness’ has often been a turn-off for me and others in my own life. I do not speak for everyone and I am not trying to, but this is my personal discomfort with the ways in which ‘popular gay culture’ is sold.

I think that by educating anyone and everyone who uses the word ‘yas’, or any of the other terminology that originates in drag culture, we could solve the problem of it being appropriative. That way, those who are accepting of its origins and willing to continue the process of educating others can continue to use the words, fully aware of their history, and anyone who is upset by gay or drag culture will probably dislike the taste of ‘yas’, and cease to use it, thus eliminating the appropriation.

 

Some links for further reading/ watching:

• Paris is Burning can be found on Netflix.
• Reply All podcast number 69: Disappeared. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/
• https://www.pride.com/movies/2015/5/20/10-things-paris-burning-taught-us
• Drag terminology explained:  https://www.reddit.com/r/rupaulsdragrace/comments/1zpy2z/drag_terminology_explained_for_the_newbies_like_me/
• An interesting article by Edward Canlon about Dorian Corey, one of the stars of Paris is Burning. TW for disturbing events. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935316?seq=12#page_scan_tab_contents

…search term ‘real feminism’ not found…

Before I begin this blog post, I would like to acknowledge something that I find incredibly frustrating: whilst I understand that university-level study is part of academia, and engaging with academic writings obviously requires a high level of knowledge, and understanding of a wide variety of concepts and terms (particularly English studies, as it often borrows from other specific schools like sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, art history and criticism, performance studies, etc), writing about feminism in this high academic style feels counter-productive to me. The style is exclusionary, the bibliography of referenced works is often almost as long as the essay itself, suggesting that a reader cannot fully appreciate the academic’s argument without also having read each of these listed pieces, and it does very little to encourage a non-academic to participate in thinking about feminism as something that relates to them. I often feel as though I’m being spoken down to, almost ridiculed, for not having made the writer’s connections between works before, and I do understand or recognise around half of their references. In my opinion, many academics writing about feminism, or post-feminism, or the importance of intersectionality would do more for education by reminding themselves that those who may not have had access to archives of academic writing are still a valuable readership.

However, ‘popular feminism’ is so repetitive, cyclical, and insubstantial that it does little to fill the void that exists between non-university-educated people and ‘feminist theory’. The reason why I believe that this is such a problem, is that it leaves generations of young people with very little accessible information about feminism, and leaves them at the mercy of media outlets’ bias against and – at times – total demonisation of feminists. It is also vital to note that we cannot simply assume that these young people will get to university and automatically engage with high theory about feminism because a) they may study a subject that never crosses paths with feminism, b) their views may have been so skewed by misinformation by the time they reach university that they have lost all open-mindedness towards feminism, and c) they may never go to university, the financial and standard-of-education reasons for which are the subject of a whole debate of its own.

To stray into the personal on what, I am aware, is intended to be a blog dedicated to a set of academic readings of contemporary popular culture, I would like to illustrate the above point with an account of the affect taken on by sections of society under the rise of ‘popular feminism’. This is an example of the situation described by Gill in ‘Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times’ as being complexly characterised as: ‘for every uplifting account of feminist activism, there is another of misogyny; for every feminist “win”, an out-pouring of hate, ranging from sexual harassment to death threats against those involved; for every instance of feminist solidarity, another of vicious trolling.’.

I am lucky that my sixth-form education took place at a Grammar School in Shropshire that was so saturated with misogyny, toxic masculinity, and casual sexual harassment that I became irrepressibly angry at the school’s complacency towards the breeding ground of upper-class entitlement over which the Senior Leadership presided, and thus sought refuge with the two feminist female teachers who still remained. They introduced me to what my parents had sheltered me from: the world is fucked up, but there are other people who are as angry about it as you are.

I actually do count myself lucky that I had the awful experiences I had at that school. Despite the fact that even as I studied Government and Politics under one of the aforementioned teachers, every expression of horror, revulsion or anger that I showed towards sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or any incarnation of the discrimination that dominated the current media stories, political precedent and historical records we analysed was met with taunting, trolling, and commands for me to ‘shut [my] left-wing, queer-loving, hairy-feminist mouth’. Even from the only two other girls in a class of twenty-three. The backlash and internalised misogyny were everywhere: in history, in the news, and in my classroom. I applied for and won the position of Deputy House Captain in my Upper Sixth year, and yet every decision I made was overruled by the six other male members around the table. No member of staff stepped in, although they were fully aware. I see stories of discrimination against girls in school dress codes across social media every week, and I relate: I was pulled up for wearing a red scarf because ‘wearing red would give the boys the wrong idea’ about me.

I could go on for thousands and thousands of words about the horrors I myself have experienced, the victim-blaming from other women, and about the sexist questions female actors like Scarlett Johansson are asked by journalists, the exploitation and abuse of the French actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux during the filming of Blue is the Warmest Colour, and the stories of harassment and assault that every one of my female friends is forced to remember. So studying what popular feminism looks like is a little difficult for me, because to me it just looks hollow. I don’t know if it can be classed as a failure of society in general, a failure of parents, or separated and held at arms’ length as a failure of the education system and, by extension, the Government. But I do know that the occasional magazine-cover about “fem-powerment” and “choosing to do something about your own low self-esteem” isn’t cutting it.

 

Further reading/ referenced links:

(A short piece by Gill that is incredibly guilty of referencing an enormous amount of theoretical writings. Interesting, but inaccessible to many, in my opinion) https://lisbonconsortium.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/rosalind-gill_postfeminism-and-the-new-cultural-life-of-feminism.pdf

(Q: Analyse some of the questions, and the wording of the result paragraph, esp. ‘lean in’) https://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamassa1/how-much-of-a-feminist-are-you?utm_term=.byzeQP79n&quiz_result=9285417_20091921#9285417

(V. Interesting article written by bell hooks about Sheryl Sandberg) http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/

(A brilliant resource for accessible and articulate articles about all aspects of intersectional feminism) https://everydayfeminism.com/