BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Anyone fancy a fag? Is "hate speech" in the eye of the beholder?

  
  

Page: 1(2)3

 
 
Shortfatdyke
08:09 / 19.04.02
dunno if this is helpful, but various racist terms used in the u.k. don't seem to have particularly hateful meanings in themselves (spade: black as the ace of spades), but it's in how they are used that they become racist. paki *is* short for pakistani, in itself no big deal, but no one here says paki in anything other than a derogatory way. i.e. 'you are less than i am'.

in the same way that someone can shout 'lesbian!' at a lesbian in the street. if she is a lesbian, then on the face of it it's just a statement of fact. but we all know that's not why it was pointed out. unless the person in question proceeds down the street screaming 'heterosexual!' at most other people. which i've yet to see.
 
 
w1rebaby
09:55 / 19.04.02
However, this is by some distance the least important element of the question.

If you consider the formulation of the question unimportant.

*shrug*

whatever, it's your thread
 
 
Loomis
09:59 / 19.04.02
Someone suggested that many of the insults of a society are defined by its prejudices, which makes sense to me. While the existence of dick and cock as insults goes part of the way towards answering the charge of misogyny in cunt or tit, I think the larger issue lies in the fact that tit, cunt, dick, cock, fuck, wank, etc are all sex words, thus indicating what our society considers (or considered) bad. Because sex is, you know, bad, m'okay?

Also I think the sound component is very important in determining how offensive a word is, and how long it retains its place in the heirarchy of insults. For example, fuck and cunt have very hard sounds, which I think is crucial to the fact that they have always been the most offensive terms. Even though fuck is quite accepted these days, I don't think it has lost its value as an arresting sound.

PS- (I couldn't resist)- regarding the 'proper' words for our bits, I've never heard anyone called a breast or a vagina, but I have heard someone called a penis.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:32 / 19.04.02
Loomis: What's the "masculine" equivalent of "slut"?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:35 / 19.04.02
Fridgemagnet: Not the formulation of the question, a minor quibble over one very minor element of it. If you fancy addressing the actual question - how about your comment on the "closeness" of the Internet? Care to expand?
 
 
Loomis
10:41 / 19.04.02
Did you actually read my post Haus?

I said "part of the way". And I was leading on to the focus of my post which was sex words in general.

Trying to get me to defend a position I never adopted does not advance the discussion.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:45 / 19.04.02
Well, no, but nor does threadrot. Unless you are arguing that as a society we direct hate speech against the sexually active...
 
 
w1rebaby
11:20 / 19.04.02
one very minor element of it

*opens mouth, then shuts it* Oh, okay, I won't keep on about that.

As far as the "closeness" thing goes... I had an idea that, since people access the internet in situations with so many familiar elements - often at home, with a similar physical object (the computer), likely using the same OS each time, often on boards with the same basic interface - they feel inherently more relaxed. There are fewer unfamiliar appearances or situations that might be cues to decide that someone is a "stranger" in the real world. Everyone looks pretty much the same in text.

I was also theorising that being relaxed in somone's company either leads to or is the same as feeling close to them. I'm not sure whether we feel close to people we can be relaxed with or we're relaxed with people because we feel close to them - I suspect the two things are closely intertwined. (That's feeling close to someone, though...)

To cut a long story short, because the internet is a more relaxed medium you feel closer to people on it, even if you've just met them, and (by Monkey's point) this leads to a possibly unjustified assumption that your "hate speech" will not be taken as such.

There are quite a few assumptions there but it's clear that people communicating over the internet do give effective strangers information and communication privileges that are normally signs of closeness. But there's other reasons why this could be the case - lack of consequences, for instance.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:43 / 19.04.02
Re: 'slut' (which of course has the same secondary meaning as 'slattern') - of course that is offensive, because it refers to a behaviour (promiscuity, 'dirtiness') which is often seen to be 'bad' in females, but less so in males. I think this puts it in a slightly different category to 'cunt', 'twat', 'dick', etc. which are often deemed offensive because of their relation to behaviours (by which I mean that, as someone has said in this thread, 'cunt' can be considered sexist when used as an insult becasue it equates female genitalia with 'bad' behaviours).

Perhaps this is not terribly useful, but it might be the case that the use of hate terms such as 'fag', 'nigger' etc. is effective because such a usage reduces the state of being homosexual or black to a behaviour, for which behaviour the offending homosexual or black person is somehow responsible. Think there are a lot of holes in that idea though - the most gaping of which is that the state of being is the problem for many bigots.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:45 / 19.04.02
That's a very interesting point - there is certianly an observable phenomenon that people often tend to find themselves sharing more of themselves - emotions, secrets, personal details - on the Internet or by email correspondence than they would normally with "people they had never met", and I suspect, although this is experiential, quite possibly a sense of intimacy is developed which might well not exist in a comparative time frame.

The next question is whether just leads to an increase in the reclamation through personal engagement of what would acontextually be considered "hate speech". To take the name of the not-quite-late, not-much-lamented Knodgboy, I suspect that one of his problems was simply not understanding the right codes for human interaction, and thus barrelling into the kind of informality, overshare and unstructured soul-baring normally only found after serious drinking.

So, does knowing somebody over the Internet engender, either through a feeling of closeness or a feeling that they cannot give you a slap, lead to a greater likelihood of reclaiming hate speech, or is it just more likely that it will be misunderstood?

On another tack - it strikes me that hate speech involves a kind of double evaluative function. If you call somebody a faggot, f'r example, you are in effect stating simultaneously "being a faggot is bad" and "this person is bad" - a double whammy of universal and personal condemnation, if you will. Is this true, and does it then create a "privileged" status for hate speech which, for example, "cock" does not have. "This man is a cock" just means "this man is [to be disapproved of]", not "cocks are to be disapproved of".

So, to go back to Aussie and Dubya, Dubya was not employing hate speech because he was expressing neither that being a Paki was bad nor that the specific people he was talking about - the Pakistani administration - were bad. He was, however, using a term that was liable to be received as a standard tool in the exercise of hate speech.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:49 / 19.04.02
On another tack - it strikes me that hate speech involves a kind of double evaluative function. If you call somebody a faggot, f'r example, you are in effect stating simultaneously "being a faggot is bad" and "this person is bad" - a double whammy of universal and personal condemnation, if you will

Thank you, Haus - this is a much better way of explaining things than my attempt.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:00 / 19.04.02
This may or may not help, but calling someone a "cunt," "cock", et al. is metaphoric while "faggot," "nigger," et al. are descriptive of states of being.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:08 / 19.04.02
Although you could say that, as they expressed the totality of somebody in terms of a part of their state of being, "faggot", "nigger", "dyke" etc are in fact metonynic. Not so sure about "cock", "cunt" etc - they could be second-order metaphors relating to qualities divorced from the ur-word - describing somebody as a cock is not meant to make people think of them as a great big penis, but as an unpleasant human being.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
13:17 / 19.04.02
Haus: it strikes me that hate speech involves a kind of double evaluative function.

In group dynamics, certainly. But then any insult can have the added function of splitting a group of people into 'good' and 'bad' ('cool/uncool' etc) sections, placing yourself firmly into the section you prefer to be a part of. Even surreal stuff like 'dickhead'.

Although even if there are no others to impress, I suppose terms like nigger, faggot etc can be used to emphasise the point that the target of the insult is being single out for what they are, rather than who they are. The point then being to suggest that the subject is fundamentally inferior for maximum impact.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
13:58 / 19.04.02
Hang on, though, that's the whole point isn't it. Hatespeech in particular, but any insult in general is about power, establishing dominance. So the offensiveness of any particular term is dependent on whether the statement is seen as an attempt to dominanate. So with people we know well it's almost impossible to truly insult or be insulted, since any heirarchy is already beyond doubt.

Conversely, a term like 'Paki' in the UK is only ever used to establish dominance, so any Brit (of Pakistani descent or otherwise) will treat it as such by default.

Hmmm, that's either the most profound post I've written since I registered, or bloody obvious. I'm sure someone won't resist the urge to tell me which.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:14 / 19.04.02
It's sort of touched upon in the Butler and the Foucault earlier, but yeah. If you call somebody who isn't black a nigger, there is no valid power exchange (unless you are *likening* him to somebody black, in which case it depends rather on whether they find that disempowering).

Now, if you are black and sonmebody calls you nigger, but you happen to be holding them at gunpoint with a signed deputation from the state that you can blow this piece of racist shit's head off if he says that word *one more time*, and a letter from his family inviting you to do so, as they always hated him and much preferred you, is the word still disempowering?
 
 
Naked Flame
15:10 / 19.04.02
Richard Pryor: 'I can say it. You can't. Them's the rules.'

In other words, the impact of a given word changes based on speaker and hearer... most linguistic theory that I've read backs that up explicitly and in great detail.

Online, we have a small problem in terms of both speaker-context and listener-context being absent referents. In terms of the speaker, we have no way of telling whether or not Richard Pryor *can* say it.

In terms of the listener, we not only have an absent referent but a plural and frequently contradictory set of absent referents. Put simply, if enough people read your post, you will offend someone. A quick analysis of Bush's 'pakis' comment shows that the same can apply to pretty much any statement. Doesn't mean he isn't a dumbass.

Mind you, I'm not a dumbass and I got the most venomous looks from waiting staff in my first sushi restaurant when I blew my nose at the table... he's only an ickle baby president.
 
 
w1rebaby
16:09 / 19.04.02
(Haus re internet "closeness"): The next question is whether just leads to an increase in the reclamation through personal engagement of what would acontextually be considered "hate speech"... So, does knowing somebody over the Internet engender, either through a feeling of closeness or a feeling that they cannot give you a slap, lead to a greater likelihood of reclaiming hate speech, or is it just more likely that it will be misunderstood?

The question that raises is, what is necessary for "reclamation"? And is it something that is done by a society as a whole, or something that can only be done by the target of the hate speech?

I think that exposure to a wide range of different opinions over the meaning of a word, expressed by people you otherwise agree with, tends to flatten your reactions to words themselves and concentrate your attention more on the intent. If the only people I've ever heard even use the word "nigger" are racists, then I will react badly when I hear it used. If I go on the net all the time and see discussions like this the word itself is going to shock me less.

As long as the same outrage at the racism itself remains, that seems healthy to me - people are the problem we should concentrate on, not words. And you can't reclaim a word if you can't even say it out loud without feeling dirty.

So, yeah, maybe net communication intrinsically does mean that hate speech has less power - at least amongst that section of the net community that has a broad base of experience of other netizens. I find more people online trying to tell me that white people should be able to say "nigger" than I do IRL, and they believe it, in the context of their society it's not abusive.

However, to truly reclaim a word in a society its negative connotations have to be removed for everyone, not just people on the net. I don't think "queer" and "nigger" have really been reclaimed, since they can still be quite easily used as hate speech in a way that "black" can't (I couldn't think of a neutral equivalent for "queer"...)

I'm not sure there's that much point in reclaiming words, anyway. If a term loses its effect as an insult, people will create new terms that are more insulting, and they'll always be able to do that, since the context is created by their intent.
 
 
alas
18:32 / 19.04.02
Although you could say that, as they expressed the totality of somebody in terms of a part of their state of being, "faggot", "nigger", "dyke" etc are in fact metonynic. Not so sure about "cock", "cunt" etc ...

i'm going to be a real ass (heh heh) and note that as I understand it, "faggot"--being originally small sticks for burning--would be an example of metonymy (calling the king the "crown"), but "cunt" and "cock" are synechdoches, taking the part as a representative of the whole (e.g. workers being called "hands," as in "farmhand.")

There will be an examination over that material on Tuesday.

alas.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:08 / 19.04.02
And I will humbly suggest that a synecdoche is always a metonym, whereas a metonym is not necessarily a synecdoche. Or is it the other way around?
 
 
Cavatina
22:44 / 19.04.02
en revanche. As alas points out, metonymy is the figurative or symbolic use of the name of one thing for another with which it is associated. And while it does include using an *attribute* for the whole (as in 'brass' for the military), this is not quite the same thing as using a part for the whole or the whole for a part, as in her 'cock' and 'cunt' examples.

As an aside, the most problematic synecdoche in English is possibly 'man' which in 'mankind' refers to both men and women, but obviously privileges men.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:26 / 20.04.02
I'm interested, moving on, inthe idea that, by generating contexts of apparent intimacy, the Interwebnet could be seen to defuse and diffuse hate speech. Anyone feel like picking up that one and running with it?
 
 
Fist Fun
13:44 / 21.04.02
Couldn't you differentiate between "hate speech" and "unaware" or "unthinking" speech? For instance, if someone uses the word faggot but insists that they didn't mean it in a homophobic way, and doesn't otherwise appear homophobic then couldn't we conclude that this is unthought out speech rather than hate speech.
 
 
bitchiekittie
14:26 / 21.04.02
and is the adoption of a word generally accepted as hate speech in ignorance the same as adopting the (also generally accepted) intent behind it? theres a huge difference between honest ignorance and the hateful bile that tends to bring such terms about, which is often overlooked
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:25 / 21.04.02
Buk - Hmm. But how much leeway should somebody be given? To have reached adulthood, have any claims to be a functionally intelligent human being and believe that there is a "benign" way to use terms like this (after all, reclamatory usages presumably rely for their power on the violent, hateful and aggressive overtones of the term) - to go "What? You mean you find being called a nigger racist? But I'm no racist...is that not providing a constant out for the endless excusing of racial, gender or whatever abuse?

Or are you proposing a "one strike" model?
 
 
Fist Fun
18:40 / 21.04.02
BK - I don't mean ignorance because that is quite a loaded word. I mean rather that certain words have an unexamined usage. For instance, in an environment where "hate words" are frequently used but not in a hate context then perhaps it is possible that they take on a meaning devoid of hate. An unexamined meaning. Is everyone able to examine meaning in the same way? Do education and environment play a part?
 
 
Rage
08:06 / 22.04.02
Is there a word for those who are opressive towards those who choose to incorporate these words into their vocabulary? They're just words, as much as "fuck" and "apple" and while they do have derogatory meanings that indicate igornace and intent to insult- I will quote Eric Cartman with:

"It doesn't hurt anyone. Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck."

"But it hurts me!" you say. "I'm a homosexul African American chick! Offensive, man!"

To this I say: it hurts you because you let it. If you get offended because of some ignorant prick who calls you a "fag" or a "nigger," you're choosing to stoop down to their mentality by dignifying their words with an inner response of you've-effected-me.

I give mad props to the black guy who doesn't judge the racist fucks who chant "nigger nigger nigger" left and right, and accepts that they have their own realities and freedoms of vocabulary choice.

To say that terms can be generally assumed to be racist regardless of context is to say that the 12 year old who calls his rival classmates "faggots" for pure insult value and the young women who makes relatively innocent "stop being a nigger" comments to her husband are racists.

No sire.
 
 
Rage
08:08 / 22.04.02
Oh ya, and you're all bunch of faggot fucking niggers!
 
 
Cavatina
11:46 / 22.04.02
Posted by Rage:

"To say that terms can be generally assumed to be racist regardless of context is to say that the 12 year old who calls his rival classmates "faggots" for pure insult value and the young women who makes relatively innocent "stop being a nigger" comments to her husband are racists."

Wherein lies the so-called 'pure insult value' in the use of these terms if not in their homophobic ans racist denotations/connotations?

And what makes you think that you can bend these terms to your will, can bring their meanings exclusively under your command? Such terms are criss-crossed and encrusted with meanings accrued from centuries of contexts of abuse and injustice. Think of the many, many past real life discursive situations and fictional stories in which they have been used. Think also on this:


"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process."

As you know, in recent times there have been moves by various *groups or communities* to re-appropriate certain terms; but even when thus re-inflected, these terms still continue to carry traces of all those other contexts in which they have been used.
 
 
Cavatina
12:00 / 22.04.02
In other words, they are not 'just words'. They're loaded terms - as your final exclamatory post to us all so eloquently acknowledges.
 
 
Ierne
13:00 / 22.04.02
...it hurts you because you let it. If you get offended because of some ignorant prick who calls you a "fag" or a "nigger," you're choosing to stoop down to their mentality by dignifying their words with an inner response of you've-effected-me. – Rage

To continue to use terminology that is knowingly offensive to other people shows an inability and/or refusal to handle the responsibility inherent in free speech.

It's easier to pawn it off on someone else ('Well, you're just sinking to their level if you allow yourself to be upset by abusive language") than to be accountable for how one speaks and what one says.

I give mad props to the black guy who doesn't judge the racist fucks who chant "nigger nigger nigger" left and right, and accepts that they have their own realities and freedoms of vocabulary choice. –

If you know a member of the African Diaspora who actually feels this way, could you please be so kind as to introduce us to hir? Because I have never met such an individual in all my life – over thirty years – nor have I met any nonwhite individual who simply "accepts" the racism of others directed at hir as "freedoms of vocabulary choice".
 
 
The Apple-Picker
19:40 / 22.04.02
What else qualifies as hate-speech? What about words that, as they stand, aren't as loaded as words like "nigger" or "cunt"? Words like "man" and "manly"? Or "girl"?

"What a man she is." "Eric, why you gotta be such a girl?"

Is this hate-speech?

What is the function of hate speech?
 
 
Fist Fun
07:43 / 23.04.02
"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process."
In that case how much personal responsibility does that place on an individual using "hate speech"? If we are unable to place our own meaning into the language we use, if instead it is a complex blend of past intention, then doesn't that excuse a misunderstanding of the complexity? To go even further if a word is used as a superficial insult without any deeper understanding or examination on the part of the speaker then ...well what would that mean?... what happens to the history of past intentions then? Does everyone have the same level of access to this inbuilt meaning? Surely, education and environment control this access.
 
 
Cavatina
11:39 / 23.04.02
Posted by Buk:

"If we are unable to place our own meaning into the language we use, if instead it is a complex blend of past intention, then doesn't that excuse a misunderstanding of the complexity?"


Buk, as I see it, we do, of course, inflect the language we use in our own particular ways and according to the situations/contexts in which we find ourselves; we tailor our language according to who is being addressed, the mode and purpose of our communication and so on. But it is also the case that language pre-exists us, and while we do often intentionally relativize meanings in our discursive exchanges, it is very difficult to expropriate them. By that I mean to appropriate words in such a way that they no longer continues to 'speak' with their dominant prior meanings. I'd argue that some words - and I think that 'nigger', for example, might well be one - resist being assimilated into entirely new contexts. Such words are limited by their prior semantic and semiotic patterning to the degree that they seem totally incongruous and jarring in the mouth of the speaker who is trying to re-contextualise them. This is because the terms continue to carry too strongly the accents of the point of view and the social forces which have become the dominant ones in our society. So, as in the case of 'nigger', they come across as downright offensive.

Language offers us discursive positions through which we can consciously live our lives as thinking subjects. If our access to the range and social power of existing discourses is limited, then, yes, we are concomitantly limited in giving meaning to the material social relations under which we live, and which structure our lives. But given the prevalence and ubiquitous nature over a long period of the 'hate speech' to which you allude, I would think that its current dominant meanings are commonly very well understood, except by the very young.

I very much agree with Ierne's comment that "to continue to use terminology that is knowingly offensive to other people shows an inability and/or refusal to handle the responsibility inherent in free speech." Rage may indeed argue that we are free to speak as we choose. We are not free, however, to imagine that our linguistic choices don't matter, are without consequence.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
15:46 / 23.04.02
Wise words from Richard Nixon:

(from Sammy Davis Jr.'s Autobiography)
He[Nixon] hesitated. "Incidentally, it is okay to say black?"
"Yes, Mr. President, we say black now. Negro and colored are not in use." He had a notepad and he wrote, "Black is preferred, colored is not," and he asked, "How did that happen?" (Why Me, 1989)
 
  

Page: 1(2)3

 
  
Add Your Reply