Slurs Subordinate by Cueing the Ideology

Abstract

In recent years, a number of authors (e.g., Rae Langton, Mary K. McGowan, and Ishani Maitra) have tried to understand sexist and racist hate speech using John Austin’s speech act theory. These authors agree that acts of hate speech subordinate in two senses: on the one hand, they cause subordination insofar as they have subordinating causal consequences. On the other hand, they also constitute subordination insofar as the speech acts themselves, i.e. independently of their causal consequences, subordinate in some sense. However, there is disagreement about how exactly subordination in this latter sense is to be understood.

My proposal builds on and refines that of Rebecca Kukla. Following Kukla, I assume that central cases of hate speech are, regarding the type of speech act, interpellations or vocatives, and that slurs are interpellations with a certain kind of content. An interpellation is a speech act of hailing another person, using a social role or identity she has, such as “Hi, Eli!” or “Officer, …”. Slurs are speech acts of the same type, however, with a derogated, subordinated social role as their content. I adopt Kukla’s general theory of speech acts to analyze interpellations. According to this theory, speech acts strive to change the normative commitments and entitlements of others. I argue that in the case of interpellations, this normative output is best understood as a call on the addressee to activate an identity or a social role she already has, according to the ideology, but which she may not be actively playing at the moment. I argue that no special authority is required to make such a call.

I then propose an explanation of the sense in which slurs constitute subordination. Applying the analysis of interpellations, we can see that slurs call upon the addressee to actively play a derogated social role she has according to the ideology. In this sense, slurs can be said to cue the ideology, to use Swanson’s suggestive phrase.