Precarious projects: the performative structure of reclamation

• I argue that slurs are complexly socially embedded.
• I consider the case of pornography's impact on viewers and how this impacts a speaker's discursive acts.
• I draw a distinction between illocutionary silencing and illocutionary distortion.
• I give an account of the performative structure of reclamation projects and discuss the pros and cons of such projects.

Derogatory terms can be powerful mechanisms of subordination, while re-appropriating these terms can be a strategy to fight back against social injustice. I argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards. Whereas more familiar forms of protest may fail to bring about their intended result, attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all. When attempts at reclamation fail, their force is distorted; context and convention lead the hearer to give uptake to the speech act as a traditional deployment of the slur. The force of this traditional use is to validate and re-entrench the very norms the act was intended to subvert. This is the precarious structure of reclamation projects: when successful, reclamation is the subversion of powerful mechanisms of oppression, but when unsuccessful, the act has the ironic force of constituting mechanisms of oppression.