Insight asks if we have the right to say what we want, even if it offends others. Watch Politically Incorrect on Tuesday, February 21 from 8.30pm on SBS or On Demand to hear from a range of voices.
Laura Pettenuzzo lives with spastic diplegia - a form of cerebral palsy that causes her muscles to move involuntarily.
For Laura, it causes pain and fatigue. For her bullies, it’s a source of jokes and ridicule.
“It feels as though something that I can't control, something about which I'm quite self-conscious, becomes a means for other people to entertain themselves,” she told Insight.
“I've had people call me Frankenstein … or things like hop-along.”
Laura Pettenuzzo
“The word ‘spaz’ had been used against me and ... other people, historically, with cerebral palsy,” she said.
“I called it out, because I saw potentially quite harmful language being popularised through a medium of a pop song that would just continue to normalize it.”
Lizzo responded to the backlash by removing the slur from her lyrics and made a public statement.
"Let me make one thing clear: I never want to promote derogatory language,” she wrote.
“As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me.”
“As an influential artist, I’m dedicated to being part of the change I’ve been waiting to see in the world,” Lizzo said.
Laura Pettenuzzo and her Nonna.
“Lizzo clearly never intended to cause harm,” Insight guest Sean Masters said.
After 20 years working in advertising, he says he’s had enough of the ‘woke’ practice of “reaching for offence in a hysterical way”.
“It effectively becomes impossible to have a conversation with someone who is ‘woke’.”
Do Australians understand what ‘woke’ means?
A 2022 study by showed less than half (43 per cent) of respondents said they could define the term.
About half (48 per cent) said it was positive, while 30 per cent said it was negative.
On the political spectrum, the same number of Coalition and Greens voters identified themselves as woke (24 and 22 per cent respectively).
The report also lists examples of things respondents described as ‘woke’, including the British Royal Family, Disney, the Wiggles, Pope Francis and federal and state MPs.
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The Burden of ‘Wokeness’
Professor Nick Enfield is a linguist at the University of Sydney. He defines ‘woke’ as a kind of social consciousness.
“‘Woke’ is certainly associated with the idea that we want to take into account the possibility others would get offended, particularly minority groups and disadvantaged people,” he said.
He said the term has positive origins.
“[It] originally comes from the idea of being enlightened and awakened to certain things that one wasn't paying attention to before,” he said.
But nowadays, Professor Enfield said, it’s mostly “being thrown around as a kind of disparaging of people's views in a certain part of the political spectrum”.
“It’s regarded as quite a negative phenomenon … people feel that they are being told what they can and can't say, and in a sense they are.
Despite the seemingly fluid definition, Laura believes respectful language is a process, but not a blame game.
“… these shifts in language can be hard to kind of keep up with if you're not in the [disability] community, but that's okay,” she said.
“We can all just do our best.”
Laura Pettenuzzo appeared on Insight's episode 'Politically Incorrect'. This episode explores a range of perspectives and the ever-shifting boundaries of political correctness.
