Original meaning Dating back to 1824, the term
social justice refers to justice on a societal level. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s,
social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991
Montreal Gazette article describes union activist
Michel Chartrand as a "Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior". Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at
Oxford University Press, said in 2015 that "[a]ll of the examples I've seen until quite recently are lionizing the person". , the
Oxford English Dictionary had not done a full search for the earliest usage.
Merriam-Webster dates the earliest use of the term to 1945. Scott Selisker writes in
New Literary History that the SJW is often criticised as the "stereotype of the feminist as unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing". Use of the term has also been described as attempting to degrade the motivations of the person accused of being an SJW, implying that their motives are "for personal validation rather than out of any deep-seated conviction". Allegra Ringo in
Vice writes that "in other words, SJWs don't hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that's not a real category of people. It's simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice." The term's negative use became mainstream due to the 2014
Gamergate harassment campaign, where it emerged as the favored term of Gamergate proponents and was popularized on websites such as
Reddit,
4chan, and
Twitter. Gamergate supporters used the term to criticise what they claimed were unwanted external influences in video game media from progressive sources. Martin states that "the perceived orthodoxy [of progressive politics] has prompted a backlash among people who feel their speech is being policed". In
Internet and
video game culture, the phrase is broadly associated with a wider
culture war that also included the 2015
Sad Puppies campaign that affected the
Hugo Awards. A study from
Feminist Media Studies noted that "the appropriation of SJW as a memetic
straw man became commonplace during and following the upheaval of #Gamergate." == See also ==