Author: blablablaandgabbler

Pre-internet, decapitalisation has a radical history. The poet e.e cummings, invariably stylised his name (as well as “I”) in lower case order to allow the reader a more fluid reading process and show his disavowal of hierarchy. The feminist theorist bell hooks decapitalises her name (itself borrowed from her grandmother) in order to decentre herself so that her readers focus on her ideas instead.

This upturning of grammatical norms is a means of questioning the status quo. “There is a prescriptivist attitude to capitalisation you learn in English classes,” says deandre miles-hercules, a PhD researcher in sociolinguistics at the University California Santa Barbara. “We can use language to reflect on and push back against systems and create new stylistic practises that bring attention to the systems by which we mean to deconstruct racism and sexism […] When [hooks] writes ‘imperialist’, ‘capitalist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘patriarchy’ she is linking all these things together in a way that is fundamentally inseparable and rejecting conventional forms of writing that are embedded in that system.”