Living with “lived experience”
Experience is hot these days. Hot, hot, hot. But it’s had an upgrade. It’s now “lived experience.” The modifier is as infallible and as seemingly redundant as the “furious” that precedes “row” or the “explosive” that precedes “revelations” in middle-market journalism. If you’ve been following the recent twists and turns of liberal identity politics you’ll have come across it constantly. It enters conversations from the Black Lives Matter movement to the swerf ‘n’ terf wars over sex-work and trans rights, and the campus politics of “cultural appropriation.” The formulation has spilled from social media into the mainstream press. A recent Telegraph film review credited the female lead with making “every syllable feel like it springs from lived experience”; a Guardian piece on Rachel Dolezal argued the term “transracial” had been coined to describe the “lived experience of children raised in homes that are different from their birth.”