Academese

1. agency - Usually used with the verb "exercise," agency is self-will. If a character in a text "exercises agency," that means they made a choice or took action on his or her own terms or to exert his or her own will.

2. centric - Academics love to talk about centric stuff. Eurocentric, afrocentric, phallocentric, ethnocentric . . . we can't get enough of it.

3. construct - Used as a noun to describe what everything is. Commonly used with the adjective "social." Race is construct. So is gender. So is class. So is language. For academics, nothing you can think of in the world is preexistent, so it is a construct. That's a fancy way of saying we made it up.

4. de - Academics like to "de-" things. Demystify, deconstruct, delegitimize . . .

5. deconstruct - No academic worth his or her salt could get by without deconstructing something. Whatever it is that has been constructed, it just means to break the joker back down.

6. demystify - Not to be confused with "demythify" which is deconstructing a myth, demystify is to take either an esoteric, misunderstood subject, but more likely a taboo, usually erotic subject and "expose" it (read: talk about it ad nauseum) so that it loses its mystique.

7. dialogue - Used as a verb. It's a way to describe what happens when two discourses meet over drinks. The feminist discourse dialoguing with the racial discourse, or how class dialogues with gender for example.

8. discourse - Used to denote any kind of speech, thought or concept. Feminist discourse, national discourse, hegemonic discourse . . . the list goes on. Just add "discourse" after any adjective, and you've got an instamatic academically smooth term to bandy about.

9. dominant - Whatever is white, male, European, upper class, has political power, is slave-owning or colonizing.

10. hegemony - Composed of or held by whoever or whatever is "dominant". The adjective form "hegemonic" is also a favorite to be used in tandem with "discourse."

11. ideology - More or less a synonym of "discourse" except it usually has a negative, propagandizing connotation.

12. myth - What some ideology or other ends up constructing that academics end up taking on the burden to deconstruct for the greater good.

13. neo - A prefix academics add to make an old, played out concept fresh again.

14. phallus - No matter what you're talking about or where you are, the phallus is going to pop up in academic conversation. It's bound to. So get ready.

15. post - Another prefix academics add to make an old, played out concept fresh again.

16. wave - For some reason, for academics, feminist thought arrives to the world at large in waves.