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.