Text by Tallulah Griffin

Slut, n.
Etymology: unknown.
Definition:
Originating in 2011, SlutWalk is a transnational movement calling for an end to victim blaming and gendered violence. Formed in response to a police talk at Toronto’s York University, where women’s dress was prioritised as a safety issue, the walks invite participants to march, attend talks, workshop, leaflet, and chant in condemnation of rape culture.

The protests have been taken up by local causes across the globe, with Latin American ‘puta’ protestors challenging femicide and the strictures of the Catholic Church, where Indian walkers denounce dowry murders and honour killings. Appropriately, this poster for the International Day against Victim Blaming calls upon a visual language of assemblage: a collage of international voices, a deluge of information streaming under the hovering cursor, a collective garnering pace. This worldwide movement has been nonetheless divided across racial lines. Janell Hobson in Ms Magazine (2011) explicates the racial baggage that problematises any reclamation of ‘slut’ as an empowering vernacular. White women, after all, are able to call upon a rhetoric of purity that has been made unavailable to women of colour, to take on ‘sluttiness’ as a garb and language of sexual liberation, and cast it off at leisure.

‘Slut’ is an irregular noun, its plurals unpredictable, its usage changeable. What to wear to walk? Hard to meet the brief. Some take on the dress of their assault, clothe themselves in painful memories to air their dirty laundry and ask who it was who sullied it. Feminists in fishnets insist that that the provocation is only political. Still others come as they are, remember it doesn’t matter what they wear, that there are many words for woman and we will wear them all.

Here, speech bubbles and placards erupt from painted mouth agape – chanting, crying, open and unavailable. Feminine body, central orifice, recast. Vagina dentata, biting back. Bared teeth, open-hearted, not erotic object but speaking body. A carnival of made-up-dressed-up women unhinging promiscuity. What does ‘slut’ mean again?

Walking, movement, remapping. A city has its own vernacular – a shortcut is the slang of streets, a turn a turn of phrase. To streetwalk is to remake space, take ‘street’ as ‘slut’ and remind onlookers that it’s only trespass, that the etymology tells only of walking out of line, that marching to the beat of the demo drum is all it takes. A buzzword is a bypass, a default, a diversion sign to the laziest conclusion. It is easier to re-tread old ground, to navigate by extant signposts citing slanderous synonyms for seductress. New language is harder to find.

At the time, critics despaired at ‘the pornification of protest’, and the possibility of male voyeurs delighting in the spectacle. Already, the idea that wearing fewer clothes or inviting erotic attention necessarily empowers a male viewer seems outdated. I wonder what words we have for this conversation now.