Slur reclamation: an empowering linguistic practice?

Résumé En

Controlling language is a basis for all power, American linguist Robin Lakoff argues in The Language War (2000), and therefore it is worth fighting for. Since the American New Left counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, historically oppressed and marginalized groups and individuals across the United States have sought to gain visibility and power through language. In addition to the coinage of new terms for self-designation (e.g. African-Americans, womyn, differently-abled), some people have engaged in reclaiming terms of offense, such as queer, crip, black or the n-word, to identify themselves. This community-driven practice, intent on transforming social norms through transforming discursive conventions, is pervasive yet complex and controversial: How exactly does it operate? What meanings does it convey? What are its power and limits? In this presentation, I will draw on existing linguistic research (Brontsema 2004, Chen 1998, Herbert 2015, Jusińska 2021, Rahman 2012, Stollznow 2022, inter alia) and corpus data to gauge the extent of the phenomenon and unpack its complexity, showing how it relates to important issues of linguistic theory, including the semantics/pragmatics boundary and the role of context in meaning-making.