usefully conceptualizes dehumanization as attributing to others either animalistic or object-like qualities, thus opening up the (latter) possibility of objective and equable dehumanization that takes “everyday forms” (p. 255). I have shown that harm projects in general rely on reductive but not necessarily animallike or debasing constructions of harm targets (Presser 2013).5
Discourse also permits concealment. “Defense of marriage” legislation in the United States shrouds discrimination against gay people, and “right to work” laws are designed to combat unionization. Communication scholar Walter Fisher (1987) finds “code words” in the speech of Ronald Reagan during his run for the U.S. presidency: “‘[F]amily’ means the nuclear family—dad, mom, son, and daughter; ‘neighborhood’ means no busing; ‘work’ means no welfare but ‘work-fare’; ‘peace’ means the United States must be the biggest, strongest country in the world in order that we preserve the peace and fulfill our manifest destiny to spread our way of life everywhere. ‘Freedom’ means freedom from governmental interference in the ‘free-enterprise’ system” (p. 151). Orwell (1968) said of political discourse generally that it is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable” (p. 139) and “largely the defence of the indefensible” (p. 136). Often, though not always, harm projects—or the harmful aspects of a practice—must be obscured if they are to meet with general tolerance, hence the use of euphemism as well as outright denial. Denial may be hard to render credible (and requires tampering with records, disappearing victims, and so forth), so euphemism would seem to be more common. Of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, Arendt (1963) explains: “All correspondence referring to [the mass killing of Jews] was subject to rigid ‘language rules,’ and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen [mobile units of shooters], it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’ occur. The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung); . . . Moreover, the very term ‘language rule’ (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie” (p. 85). Language rules facilitated the cloaking of reality such that harm agents were able to delude themselves and others as to what they were really doing. Even the delusions were represented euphemistically: speakers lied to themselves about the fact of lying. That they spoke in code meant a subterfuge for their actions, to the outside world and to themselves.
Coding is surely culturally and historically specific. “Final solution” was typical of the ethos of technocratic problem solving promoted by the Nazi regime. Today, neoliberalism frames many harmful actions and patterns as positive in part by constructing them as sites of choice in a marketplace of options. Hence, celebrations of “diversity” provide cover for social inequalities and even render racial difference “the source of brand value” (Gray 2013, p. 771). “School choice” (Douglas-Gabriel and Jan 2017) and “justice campuses” (Schept 2015) prompt notions of people with options and thereby efface oppression, inequality, and hardship.
Some of the most careful elaborations of the impact of linguistic figuration on mass harm are feminist works. These stress misrepresentation and obfuscation via prevailing expressions for gendered harming and harm victims. They also show that societal relations of power enable certain discourses to achieve hegemony and thereupon solidify those relations of power. For example, Beneke (1982) undertook a study of rape-enabling metaphors that reaffirms Burt’s (1980) study of rape myths, discussed previously, but attends more closely to discourse. What Beneke (1982) calls rape language, discerned through interviews with men, includes the following metaphors:
• Sex is achievement.
• Sex is a commodity.
• Sex is possession.
• Sex is madness.
• Women are objects.
• A woman’s appearance is a weapon.
• Rape is theft of a valued commodity.
• Rape is instruction.
These metaphors have impactful variants, such as sex is a particular kind of achievement like a game or a war.
Planning for harm is likewise configured through gendered metaphors. Cohn (1987) describes metaphors in use that link nuclear planning to sexuality (e.g., a weapon producing “an orgasmic whump”); virginity (e.g., a bomb “losing her virginity”); domesticity (e.g., “weapons systems can ‘marry up’”) and prosocial interaction more generally (e.g., “pat a B-1”), birth (e.g., “It’s a boy”); and godliness (e.g., “the nuclear priesthood”). Cohn (1987) summarizes:
Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation—all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the discourse. Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. (p. 715; emphasis in original)
Language demarcates thought and speech, disallowing “certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed” (Cohn 1987, p. 708) and thus governing what can be contemplated and debated. The language of defense planning, Cohn discovered, precludes a holistic perspective on what people are truly up to: “The problem . . . is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself—as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge” (p. 712). The “technostrategic discourse” Cohn was privy to acts “as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons for these (nuclear weapons development and deployment) decisions hide. . . . rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons” (p. 716). The discourse obscures reality.
Similarly, in The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams (1990) emphasizes wording and the concealment it effects. She juxtaposes violence against nonhumans with violence against women in order to demonstrate that “patriarchal culture authorizes the eating of animals” (p. 13). She points out ways in which the oppression of women and nonhuman animals is conjointly accomplished, and feminist vegetarian resistance defused, through discourse. First, the experience, even the beingness, of nonhuman animals and women goes missing in the mainstream language of patriarchal societies (p. 40): “Just as dead bodies are absent from our language about meat, in descriptions of cultural violence women are also often the absent referent. Rape, in particular, carries such potent imagery that the term is transferred from the literal experience of women and applied metaphorically to other instances of violent devastation, such as the ‘rape’ of the earth in ecological writings of the early 1970s” (pp. 42–43). As such, language distances us from the “literal facts” (p. 75) of experiences of violence. Second, the relatedness of male to female and human to nonhuman is denied through various discursive means—by representing “man” as the universal human, using “animal” for nonhuman animal and thus denying that humans are animals as well, using the degendered “it” for nonhumans, and using metaphors that regularize violence toward nonhumans (e.g., “beating a dead horse”) (pp. 64–65). Third, animal bodies that are killed for meat are largely female or feminized bodies: “We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status” (p. 72). Fourth, women and nonhumans are assigned to one of two mutually exclusive subject positions: “good or evil, emblems of divine perfection or diabolical incarnations, Mary or Eve, pet or beast” (p. 74). Adams refers to such classification
