Counter-energize it!

Thinking about a paper I heard yesterday it occured to me that perhaps the time has come for me to coin another word, a compound word. This time the word is 'counter-energy'. I checked the internet and did not find any use of the word, so I guess if there was no such word before, there needs to be one now. To counter-energize a word is to evacuate the othering, derogatory, demeaning energy that animates the word and to replace that energy with one that is self-constituting, self-affirming and valorising in order to counter the energy that the word was phallogocentrically imbued with before. The earliest example of counter-energizing may be the 'black is beautiful' slogan raised in the 1960's, the counter-energizing of the word 'queer' by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 is, to me, its best instance so far. It is also being used as an empowering strategy by practitioners of fat studies, as I discovered yesterday, 14 August 2009, at a seminar here in the city at the American Centre. There may be, if one jogs one's memory a bit, quite a few other such instances of 'counter-energizing' but I'm sure no one word or no one verb existed to express the act of appropriating a word in such a way that the nature of the word's energy changes completely. It is not the mere act of appropriation, but the nature of the change in the usage of the word which I wish to indicate through the word 'counter-energizing'. I guess in India if queer men started calling themselves 'chhakka' and with pride that would be a counter-energizing act and it would be an act, because we have been taught by J.L. Austin and by Judith Butler how to do things with words! So, it would be an act, even a political one.