I don’t often read sponsored tweets—they’ve gotten especially peculiar and useless since You Know Who took over the joint last year—but a tweet from Fondation L’Oréal, the research-supporting arm of the global cosmetics company, caught my attention last week. One word in particular made me blink: invisibilized.
Promoted tweets no longer have date stamps, and although I captured a screenshot I neglected to save the original link. But this usage wasn’t unique; “invisibilization” showed up frequently throughout Fondation L’Oréal’s messaging in March, International Women’s Month. Here’s another tweet; here’s a LinkedIn post.
I’d never the seen the word, and I wondered whether it was a French import or one of those diversity-equity-inclusion buzzwords like “othering.” The answers, as far as I’ve been able to tell: not likely and maybe, sort of.
Invisibilize, sometimes spelled invisiblize (my spellchecker dislikes both spellings), means “to make invisible; to marginalize so as to erase the presence or contributions of.” I found that definition in wordsense.eu, whose earliest citation for the word is from 2002, in Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. (“[…] there is also the danger […] that such a critique recuperates gender in terms that quite literally invisiblize the very issues of race and ethnicity which, as Rolling Stone demonstrates, are crucial to an understanding […] of rock as a musical/cultural practice.”) Wiktionary goes back further, to a 1996 usage in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. (“As Ishmael Reed so bluntly points out, deception and sublimation are put to hard labor to invisibilize this influence in a society that is fertilized by its presence.”) But neither the OED nor Merriam-Webster, nor any other standard dictionary I checked, includes any form of invisibilize.
In their Grammarphobia blog, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman took a crack at invisibilize in October 2022. They dug up a 19th-century example of the word in an 1840 farce, Like Father, Like Son, originally performed in London: “Where shall I invisibilize myself? Is there no friendly cupboard, or chimney, or coal-cellar?” They found invisibilization in a book published in the U.S. in 1936, God in a Rolls Royce: The Rise of Father Divine, Menace or Messiah? The author, John Horshor, “writes that Father Divine, an African-American religious leader, coined terms ‘such as physicalate, omnilucent, intutor, invisibilization, contagionized, begettion,’ and so on.” Father Divine used the noun invisibilization as a synonym for “disappearance” or “hiding,” just as Like Father, Like Son had used the verb invisibilize to mean “conceal” or “hide.”
That’s a different sense than the sociological one that’s been circulating since the second half of the 20th century, write O’Conner and Kellerman:
The earliest example we’ve seen is from a book by an American sociologist about racism and sex:
“Historically, when black men and women came in contact with white men and women, whatever the occasion, the blacks had a fixed role to play, a rigid, docile way to act, in order to nullify (‘invisibilize’) the sexuality of their presence” (Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-ups, 1971, by Calvin C. Hernton).
Since then, “invisibilize” has been used in many areas (gender, politics, fashion, music, religion, etc.) to mean exclude, ignore, erase, or dismiss.
In many areas, but not in general dictionaries. However, visibilize—a “very formal” verb meaning “to make visible something that was previous intangible or invisible to the naked eye”—has earned an entry in Macmillan’s Open Dictionary. And on Twitter, Kelly Wright, an American sociolinguist and lexicographer, told me of two academic conferences with “visibilizing” or “visiblizing” in titles. One of them, to be held in Germany in October, will feature the Visibilizing Normative Regional Historical Multilingualism Project.
O’Conner and Kellerman observe: “Although these term[s] are often seen in scholarly writing by social scientists, they haven’t made the transition from academese to ordinary English, which is why they aren’t yet in standard or etymological dictionaries.”
Perhaps L’Oréal’s use of the words will elevate them from jargon to common parlance.
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Related: Read my 2014 post about the L’Oréal brand Vichy.
Reminds me of when I first saw “homeless” described as “unhoused.”
#justsaying 🤓
Posted by: James Asher | July 04, 2023 at 06:20 AM