The Social Life of Slurs

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women

Genealogies of Slavery

This chapter addresses the concept of slavery, exploring its character and significance as a dark page in history, but also as a specifically criminological and zemiological problem, in the context of international law and human rights. By tracing the ambiguities of slavery in international law and international development, the harms associated with slavery are considered. Harms include both those statutorily proscribed, and those that are not, but that can still be regarded as socially destructive. Traditionally, antislavery has been considered within the parameters of abolition and criminalization. In this context recently, anti-trafficking has emerged as a key issue in contemporary anti-slavery work. While valuable, anti-trafficking is shown to have significant limitations. It advances criminalization and stigmatization of the most vulnerable and further perpetuates harm. At the same time, it identifies structural conditions like poverty, vulnerability, and “unfreedom” of movement only to put them aside. Linked to exploitation, violence and zemia, the chapter brings to the fore some crucial questions concerning the prospects of systemic theory in the investigation of slavery, that highlight the root causes of slavery, primarily poverty and inequality. Therefore, the chapter counterposes an alternative approach in which the orienting target is not abolition of slavery but advancing structural changes against social harm

Two Kinds of Indexicality

No abstract