Do you own the words you use to define yourself?

I define myself as an otaku. However, dozens of people have personally written to me to tell me I’m wrong. For various reasons, they’ve decided that I can’t use this word or that it describes something that isn’t me.

This doesn’t surprise me. I have to define “otaku” every time I bring it up. It’s a relatively new word that was coined in Japan in the 1980s that spread to Western countries a few years later.

As scholar Lawrence Eng writes, otaku literally translates to “your home,” so all slang definitions for the word are up to the cultural context we place around it. I’d argue that the term is still ambiguous, still applicable to its original use as a derogatory term, but also widely known as a catch-all for enthusiasts of all kinds.

With shifting parameters like these, nobody’s definition can be overtly wrong. Yet people still feel obliged to “correct” me, possibly because they feel an ownership over words or meaning that they do not think I deserve.

I started thinking about the ownership of words when I wrote an article on fangirl culture. My source, Flourish Klink told me that although the word “fangirl” is sometimes used to trivialize women’s involvement in fandom, she wanted to “reclaim” it.

Reclaim it from who? Based on our interview, the patriarchy. Klink said she’s especially interested in studying the ways women respond to media texts, an interaction that is responsible for millions of creative fanfics, pieces of fanart, and apparently, much of Rule 34.

Read the story and let me know what else you’d like to know. Because this is just a preview.

This weekend, the Daily Dot is sending me (and most of my coworkers) to report on ROFLcon, which we’re also sponsoring. It’s a really exciting time for me because it marks the first time ever that I’m literally being paid to report on a fan convention.

As I’ve written before, opportunities like this one are the reason I started Otaku Journalist in the first place. I’d dreamed of being a convention reporter, but I wasn’t sure how I could make it happen. My solution (as I’ve also written before), was to define myself as a journalist and start reporting, despite the fact that nobody was paying me to do it yet.

Maybe other people think a “journalist” is somebody who gets paid to report. Or somebody who has her articles published somewhere other than a personal blog.

My definition didn’t fit at first. But I grew into it.