as small as a world and as large as alone

2:20pm September 9, 2014

cisyphus:

Slurs are not oppressive because they are offensive, they are oppressive  because slurs by nature of being slurs draw upon certain power dynamics  to remind their target of his/her/their vulnerability in a certain relation to power and as an extension of that, to threaten violence and exploitation of that vulnerability.

This is also why I refuse to use the definition of ‘slur’ a lot of people around here use, which is basically 'any word that can be connected back to an oppressed group in a way that might be offensive’.  To me, for it to be a slur, it has to have an element to it of insisting that the people being described are subhuman or inhuman in some way, it has to include unperson deeply in its definition.  There are words that are slurs, there are words that come close to being slurs but aren’t, and there are words that are just not slurs even though in some contexts they’re insulting or offensive to a group of people.  And people are not drawing distinctions between any of those things, and that causes problems.

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