Last night I was an invited panelist at a meeting of the Bath University LGBT+ Group. It was an intersectional event, and the panel includes representatives from the university’s race and gender equality groups (though not a disability activist, which was a shame). The panel was part of a campaign the LGBT+ group is running called “That’s So Straight”, which aims to raise awareness of the use of “gay” to mean “bad”.
The theme of the panel was reclaiming words. Should we, the panelists were asked, use words such as C*nt, N*gger, F*ggot, Tr*nny and so on when they are still viewed as offensive by many members of our respective communities? It was a wide-ranging and interesting discussion, and we ended up mostly agreeing that reclaiming words was a good thing, but with significant reservations.
Chloe for the gender equality group made the good point that the offensiveness of words is very much dependent on power structures. Calling a man a pussy is offensive in a way that calling a woman a dick will never be.
Miada for the race equality group noted that word reclamation is generally led by young people, and the elders may not always be happy about what they are doing. I noted that a lot of older LGBT folk, especially gay men, are very upset about the reclamation of queer.
For my own part I described how tr*nny is generally viewed as offensive by much of the trans community, but is a beloved nickname for many cross-dressers.
I also opined that, due to the games played on social media, the whole idea of offensive words has pretty much jumped the shark. When you have a group who refuse to accept any term for people who are not trans other than “normal people”, and reject anything else as a slur, it becomes very difficult to talk about trans issues. Also I see quite a lot of people on Twitter who proudly have SJW as part of their handles, while another sizeable group is running around wailing, “SJW is a slur, how dare you call me that!”.
It is a difficult issue. On the one hand I profoundly distrust the policing of language. On the other hand, hate speech exists, and so does carelessness. I noted, that the list of words people had suggested to use to mean “bad” instead of “gay” included “lame”. Some of the gay guys actually defended that, which is why I wish there had been a disability activist there.
At the end of the panel we talked about words we would like to reclaim. My own suggestion was “Radical Feminist”, which I would like to mean something other than an angry bigot who spends all her time policing other women’s behavior, allies with the likes of GamerGate, and thinks that the need for the extermination of trans women is the most important issue facing feminists today. My thanks to people on Twitter who sent in their suggestions. Special thanks to Lee Wind who suggested reclaiming the term “family values”, and to Gili Bar-Hillel who wants to reclaim the word “puppy”.
My thanks to Ellen Edenbrow for inviting me and chairing the panel so well, and to all of my fellow panelists.
Two points I’d like to make.
The first is that the pink triangle that has become the defining symbol of our family was reclaimed, as we all know, from the Nazi concentration camp badges. There is power in that transformation.
The second is that it is important to recognize the difference between a word used by an in-group to describe itself and they way outsiders use the very same words. Nigger, in the current urban American usage is an example of this, as is (sometimes, depending on outsider usage) the word for my people: Jew.
I am comfortable with who I am I do not need to and will not invest emotional energy into slurs people choose to call me because of my ancestry, my orientation or whatever. To the people who use such terms, that’s their burden.
Thanks for reminding me about in-group use. We did indeed discuss that. My own view, and I think of most of the panel, is that if you have to police the use of a word outside of your community then you haven’t actually reclaimed it.