Who cares? We shouldn’t dictate how we refer to ourselves by how it makes cishets react.
Who cares? We shouldn’t dictate how we refer to ourselves by how it makes cishets react.
Interesting! Personally I've never been a fan of reclaimed slurs. I don't consider myself queer, because rhat word has negative connotations for me. I don't want to identify as a slur. And for the F and T slurs, I don't use them in casual conversation. The only time I ever use them is to accentuate something when talking about bigotry. (Such as "the government wants us tr***ys dead")
I use queer, mostly because I do consider myself a bit ‘weird’ as well so it’s a fun but of wordplay for me. I don’t use other slurs that could apply to me though. I guess ‘queer’ feels like a… ‘soft’ enough term to me that I don’t feel uncomfortable.
I mean, I don’t refer to myself or others with any of the bigger slurs. Aloud, anyway. That said - yeah, nah, you will pry queer from my cold dead queer little fingers. My gender and sexual orientation don’t neatly fall into the usual boxes, and considering some members of the community will turn into high school bullies the instant someone outside those neat little boxes pipes up, I’m not exactly keen on trying to explain to people who will never understand something I can’t properly put into words. “Queer” is accessible and understandable enough.
Depends on one's age too. If you ask boomer aged folks, even those who aren't queer, they see that word very differently than younger folks. As a millennial it weirded me out in the 2010's, but now it just another word. Those under 20 probably don't even bat an eye when they hear it.
What about "fae and offputting"?
I read the article and I found an issue with the research. They did their research with Poles. Did they used reclaimed slurs in English? Did they used Polish variants? These are different linguistic and cultural factors in play, especially as words change meaning and so do meanings change words trough time.
I think you pointed out the most important thing about this article.
I feel like this is obvious when the reclamation doesn’t actually change the use case. The n word is like the go-to example of reclaimed slurs, but that’s because it was changed into a very multi-purpose word, it wasn’t reclaimed by being used 1-1 the same but by black people. It’s what people get wrong about the reclamation of, say, the R slur, by trying to “reclaim” it by using it exactly the same as it’s already used, but while being neurodivergent
"Queer" has changed drastically.
Yeah, but, isn't that the point? Make the word so frequently used that it loses its extra hateful charge?
The studies show that exposure to reclaimed slur words desensitizes some heterosexual listeners to standard hate speech
So, the straight people stop thinking of "faggot" as an insult. Is that the outcome we want?
In the first experiment, the researchers recruited 489 heterosexual Polish adults.
The researchers found that exposure to homophobic language at a pride setting caused a desensitization effect among conservative and moderate participants. After hearing the reclaimed slurs, these individuals rated subsequent traditional hate speech as less offensive than people who had listened to neutral audio clips.
Straight people thought hate speech was less offensive after hearing gay people use that same speech.
Instead, the context seemed to signal that using derogatory language against gay people was generally acceptable in contemporary society.
The team recruited 181 gay individuals from Poland
Listening to reclaimed hate speech caused a notable drop in the gay participants’ moods, matching the mood deterioration caused by traditional hate speech.
So, hearing reclaimed hate speech makes us feel as bad as actual hate speech.
Some people need to read the article before commenting on it.
I saw this posted in the science sub, and even there a good amount of people were calling it out. Reclaimed slurs only work among individuals who actually reclaimed them, and using queer examples means the terms are much newer in the reclaimed space. Making it about the N word would have been stronger, as that one has been used among friends in the community much longer than the F word or even the word queer has been used positively. It also reminded me of the study that supposedly says trigger warnings don't work. In that study they laid some heavy warnings on some people with heavy triggers, then monitored how stressed they were. WHen they predictably got stressed, they deemed the warnings useless. The actual warnings are meant for someone with the trigger to know to avoid or screen for a moment, not to make processing it easier. Similar vein here, if you take a minority and just play a recording of a slur, there's no way that clinical environment will sound friendly, you're just playing slurs at a minority.
This is a weird study. Why do we care how straight people view reclaimed queer language when they were the problem and reason it was derogatory to begin with?