Are Reclaimed Slurs Offensive?

Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, University Vita-Salute San Raffaele)

The Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG), a research unit of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, invites you to the second event of the new MLAG Seminar Series featuring talks by international researchers on topics of interest to the group. The talk, given by Bianca Cepollaro (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele) and entitled "Are Reclaimed Slurs Offensive?" (joint work with Alessandra Zappoli, Nicolò D’Agruma, Giulia Giunta, Simone Sulpizio and Filippo Domaneschi). will take place on December 18, 13:00-14:30 Western European Time (WET). The meeting is online. MS TEAMS details: Meeting ID: 333 525 999 219 0; Passcode: DG7tU3tX.

The seminar is jointly organized by Sofia Miguens (MLAG-IF), Dan Zeman (MLAG-IF), James Grayot (MLAG-IF), Rafael Antunes Padilha (MLAG-IF|IFCH-UNICAMP), Samuel Lima (FLUP) and João Carlos Rocha Lima (FLUP). Information about MLAG can be found here: https://ifilosofia.up.pt/research-groups/mlag. To contact the organisers, please send an email to [email protected].

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

Can reclamation neutralize the sting of slurs? This study provides the first experimental investigation of the online processing of reclaimed slurs in Italian, combining offline offensiveness ratings with online reading-time measures. Following Galinsky et al. (2013), we take ingroup first-person uses of slurs (“I am an S”) as a proxy for reclamatory uses, and third-person uses of slurs by someone who is not characterized as an ingroup as a proxy for standard derogatory uses (“He is an S”). We thus contrast these first- and third-person uses of slurs with their non-slurring counterparts. Findings reveal that third-person uses of slurs are judged most offensive, first-person uses of non-slurring labels are judged least offensive, and reclamatory uses of slurs (i.e., first-person ingroup uses) fall in between. Crucially, reading times mirror this pattern: more offensive expressions slow down processing, showing that the mitigated offensiveness of reclamatory uses is reflected in real-time comprehension, not just reflective evaluation. This study refutes strong versions of Optimism – holding that reclamation neutralizes pejorative force –, and Pessimism –maintaining that slurs’ toxicity remains stable across different uses. Our results align more closely with Instrumentalists, according to whom for reclamation to work, the tokened slurs must be associated with both negative and positive contents; and possibly with Ambiguitists – for whom slurs are ambiguous between a derogatory and a reclamatory meaning. Both approaches must explain how exactly reclamatory uses of slurs are processed. Finally, we found that, as philosophers highlighted, allegedly “neutral” labels show traces of mild offensiveness in third-person uses, which disappears in first-person uses.