Keeping the Word Fae Meaningful

 I'm about to say something very unpopular here. The current trend to refer to absolutely anything cute, odd, unusual, or beautiful as 'fae' is actively encouraging the disenchantment and disempowerment of the concept of fairies and the Otherworld. It also often leans into ableism, objectification, and exoticism

Not a fairy but a deer at the Seneca Army Depot in New York. Photo © blmiers2 / Flickr Creative Commons license. The deer at this particular location are often white

So let's break this down a bit. 

The trend itself is enormously wide ranging and encompasses everything from people and animals with albinism to unusual crystals, foods that look like natural objects or natural objects that look like food, unusual animals/people/plants/etc.,, any odd or generous behaviour by humans or animals, places that are especially beautiful, even bizarre jewelry. Any and all of these things may be labeled 'fae' and shared with comments speculating their inhuman nature or source, even when the source is known and blatantly human. 

Now there is some long history to labelling things Otherworldly as a sign of praise or because of a concern that they actually are. Alaric Hall in his book 'Elves in Anglo-Saxon England' discuses the use of the term aelfscyne [lit. 'elf beautiful'] as a description for very attractive humans going back a thousand years. There has also been a history of referring to things and people as connected to the Good Folk in Celtic language speaking cultures, often with an attached assumption of both attractiveness and danger; people have been killed or pushed out of communities for this*.  The key difference in the first case is that the term was used as a comparative, rather like saying 'she's an angel' today, with an understanding that it wasn't meant literally; in the second case the implied association was stronger and could result in harm to the human in question. 

In the current trend I have seen people claim everything from images of especially beautiful animal breeds, like the Akhal Teke, to a professor ranting about mushrooms, as examples of something fae. Do people actually believe that a breed of horse is fae? That a man lecturing about mushrooms is fae? That the range of people, animals, plants, crystals, and objects the word gets applied to are Otherworldly? I don't think so based on the way the concept is being treated, although it is used with a mock seriousness. So why then do I care so much about this?

For one thing I see this watering down of the term to apply to anything and everything as a continuation of a long process of disempowering the Good Folk. It goes back hundreds of years, tied to shifting euphemisms for these beings to things like 'wee folk' and 'little people' which emphasized their reduced power and stature - literally minimizing beings once seen as human sized and godlike into small beings of limited influence. Words have power and using such disempowering terms shapes how people understand these beings. In the same way applying the term fae to such a huge range of things renders the term just another vague compliment like 'pretty' and removes its actual power.

Now the above argument may seem a bit rigid, especially as language does change and evolve with time and use. There are other layers to this as well though and they deserve consideration. Labelling humans with albinism or with heterochromatic eyes, for example, as fae can be offensive to the person in question - in fact I have seen people several times ask not to be othered this way. Implying humans with a medical condition aren't actually human has a long and dangerous history that has and still is getting people killed. There's a degree of ableism in the idea that people who are medically different, and therefore not 'normal', are not in fact human. The same applies to animals in my opinion. 

 This application of fae to everything also often serves to objectify the subject - from a person, animal, object, or place into something that is not of this world and therefore open to being taken and entirely reimagined. A simple exchange with a nice person in line at a coffee shop becomes fodder for a 'fae' narrative that allows the teller to centre themselves against a magical backdrop and become the main character in a living urban fantasy**. Its dehumanizing literally and figuratively. 

There is also a concerning level of exoticism that is going on with much of this that I think needs to be considered. Labelling a foreign breed of horse like the aforementioned Akhal Teke as fae is literally turning an animal from a foreign country into something Otherworldly. This is just a new iteration of the old an inappropriate obsession that western cultures have long had with anything and everything outside themselves, manifested historically through orientalism and the 'noble savage' trope. Just because a person, animal, or place seems fantastic or exotic to you doesn't make it Otherworldly and there needs to be some serious consideration about the inappropriateness of forwarding such ideas in the 21st century, no matter how much fun people feel the idea of fae is. 

When absolutely anything and everything becomes 'fae' then the word and concept are rendered effectively meaningless. Worse the word is being used to forward things like ableism, objectification, and exoticism that we should be actively fighting against. And  ultimately rather than making us more aware of what is Otherworldly around us this over use of the term makes us instead unable to discern any of it. 

So perhaps give some thought to who and what is labeled as fae^ going forward.

*an example being Bridget Cleary, a woman who was accused of being a changeling and murdered by her family
** to be clear I do think humans still have modern day encounters with fairy beings, including in coffee shops, but the vast majority of the stories I see under the label fae are easily explained and clearly entirely human in nature
^ self labelling being a separate issue not being discussed here. Call yourself fae if you want to; its labelling others that way that's problematic.