About the Concept
Minorized qualifies the agency of a specific culture, an opinion, a group of persons… within another dominant culture, the minorized culture can be one of a majority of people or preexisting the dominant culture, it will still be considered as a minority because of its lack of agency to reach the dominant communication models, and circles of power.
Sources
The word minority strictly refers to quantities.
No group of people should be considered minor, or lesser. We are all people, and therefore, we are all equal. The word minority should strictly refer to numbers, and data that can be compared in a cumulative manner.
The building of Nation-States around a territory, a political project and a language led to a formidable normalization process, resulting in the exclusion from the public sphere of many different cultures some of which were existing previously, or who are indispensable for the dominant culture to survive.
No one is born a “minority” and no culture is minor with reference to another one, each culture and each person are of equal importance, they only have different agencies, and different access to power, therefore some cultures are “minorized”. Employing a verb instead of a noun is important as it makes explicit that minorization is an action, a process, therefore it is evolutive; situation can change.
Karen Barad’s non representational diffractive approach to idendity helps us take in account the importance of each participant to a culture and the necessity to acknowledge the cumulative relation.
Tree of Significance
- SYNONYM
- minoritised, brought to the margins, unaccounted for, made invisible
- ANTONYM
- dominant, ruling, visible
- HYPERNYM
- ethics, politics, agency
- HYPONYM
- attention, relation