Reclaiming words: Who can reclaim what?

I suppose i'd better start this post with a warning, however obvious it might be: this post will, by necessity, contain many words which many people will find hurtful and/or offensive. It's pretty much impossible to talk about the politics of reclaiming words used against minority groups without using those words, so if you are someone who is triggered or offended or similar just by seeing those words in print, then don't read this post, because it would be impossible for me to write it without using them. (Some may think that that means i shouldn't write this post at all; they should be right. Give me a convincing argument that i shouldn't have written it in the comments, and i might agree with it - but this post is, itself, an attempt to address that debate...)

I've been vaguely thinking about the politics of reclaiming offensive words for quite a while, but a few recent discussions in different places inspired this post. Firstly, there was a subscription request to an email list that i am a moderator of (which, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with disability, or any minority/identity politics - it's a local climate change activist list) from someone whose email address was "retardedgimp@_______.com". This pretty much stopped me in my tracks - my first thought was to delete it as the person must have been trolling and have registered that email address solely to be offensive. Then i thought of other possibilities - that it might actually be a disabled person reclaiming the terms "retarded" and "gimp" as positive self-description... or that it might be a non-disabled person who was, perhaps somewhat misguidedly, using the "non-PC" or "outsider" value of those words as some sort of intended-to-be-positive (although probably still offensive) jokey self-deprecating/self-aggrandising (depending on which way round you look at it).

I posted in my Facebook status that i wasn't sure how to respond to it, and got a few responses - the first (from someone who, i think, assumed the owner of the email address was a disabled person) saying:

Is it really any different to someone calling themselves a "cripple"?

For some reason most disabled people respect the reclamation of most old, offensive words, except retarded. Retarded is seen as evil at all costs and must never be used.

I'm in favour of reclamation equality. If I can call myself a cripple then a learning disabled person has every right to call themselves a retard.

However, another person responded: "i actually dont even like people whose impairments don't cause spasms using the term 'spaz'" - implying arguably that the term "retarded", by analogy, was reclaimable, but not by all disabled people, only by those with learning disabilities - despite the fact that, in my experience, "retard" gets used as an insult for anyone who appears to be disabled, whether the impairment is physical or mental, and so does "spastic"/"spaz" (although there may be UK/US differences there - i seem to recall reading about someone in the US who grew up thinking that "spastic" referred not to the muscle spasms typical of cerebral palsy, but to behaviour typical of people with ADHD - perhaps similar to casual usage of "manic" over here?)

I think the first commenter was right that, of the many common disability-related slurs and insults, "retard" is the one that never or almost never seems to be reclaimed. I've been struggling to articulate why i think that is, and why there seems, for me, to be an inherent negativity in "retard" that makes me feel like it, unlike "crip", "gimp" or even "spastic", is unreclaimable, that it's something people would never want to call themselves - is it the mind/body dualism (which i think is a false one) so prevalent in our culture that makes terms referring to the state of someone's mind somehow seem more "fundamental", more "intrinsic" to a person than terms describing the state of someone's body? (and, if so, why do i not mind the reclamation of terms like "nutter" and "mentalist"?) is it the meaning of "slowed" or "delayed" that just seems inherently negative, with nothing reclaimable for positive meaning within it? or is it something entirely different? could there even be internalised vestiges of patronising stereotypes in my perception of it as more unambiguously negative than physical-impairment-related words (learning-disabled people being seen as intrinsically unable to defend or define themselves)?

Looking around for discussions in the disability blogosphere about reclaiming words, i found this post by PhilosopherCrip (whose blog i have somehow been ignorant of, despite friends like cripchick being regular commenters there - and there's another thing - can i imagine a blogger calling hirself "PhilosopherRetard" or "retardchick"?), discussing different usages within the disability community of the word "crip" - as a term that can be used as a political identity for all disabled people, or only for those with physical impairments? Even within the radical part of the UK disability rights movement, i find people who use both senses of the word - some physically impaired activists explicitly including all disabled people, regardless of impairment, in it, while a visually impaired activist friend uses it in a sense that very clearly doesn't include himself, for example critiquing paradigms of personal assistance as "all defined by crips" (meaning physically impaired people to the exclusion of other categories of disabled people). I find my own use of the term to be ambiguous, not actually certain whether i am using it in the inclusive or exclusive sense, and never quite certain whether, as an "able-bodied disabled" person, i can use it to include myself - but i've never felt that i shouldn't use the term at all, as the friend who commented on my Facebook status clearly felt about "spaz" (and many trans people do about "tranny"; see further down this post).

In the comments to PhilosopherCrip's post, cripchick says "but to switch it up a bit, if ND really took power in ideology and the shaping of our movement, what would the disability community look like if everyone called themselves aspies?" It's interesting that my first reaction to that is "that's a completely different thing", seeing "A/aspie" (i'm never sure whether or not to capitalise, TBH) as far more specific, and feeling both that physically impaired people could and should object to "aspie" being used as a blanket term for all disabled people, and that i would be uncomfortable with the term being used to refer to a person who was physically (or otherwise) impaired but not on the autistic spectrum.

Then again, i have mixed feelings about the term "aspie" anyway; for one thing, i'm not sure that i want a term deriving from the name of a doctor who studied autistic children in the 1930s to be a part of my identity, for another i think it's a loaded term with regard to the so-called distinction between "Asperger's syndrome" and "(non-Asperger) autism", which i think is a totally untenable one (the ever-amazing Amanda Baggs has great posts about this here and here), and i don't want to support that division; but sometimes i do use it to refer to myself, as a convenient shorthand, or for example when saying that someone "has a few Aspie traits" (where those would usually be traits of the general type of autism which is highly verbal but impaired primarily in non-verbal communication). "Autie" could be an alternative, but then that tends to get used in phrases like "aspies and auties" to refer specifically to "non-Asperger autistics", so that's problematic too; in the end, for my own self-definition i think i prefer just using "autistic".

This isn't just a debate in the disability sphere: recently on Questioning Transphobia, there was a repost of a call for submissions for a book called "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation" by Bear Bergman, and in both places heated discussion emerged of the reclaimed-or-otherwise status of the term "tranny", which seems to be somewhere between "crip" and "retard" in the reclamation stakes - in that, unlike "retard", there are significant numbers of people trying to reclaim it, but unlike "crip", there are significant numbers of people who don't think it should be reclaimed at all (or, at least, i don't think i've seen that attitude to "crip") - but, like "crip", there is also a debate about whether a wider group (in this case, all trans* people) can reclaim it, or only a narrower subset (in this case, trans women) within that group, with many trans women making a convincing case for the latter based on the fact that it is primarily, if not exclusively, trans women against whom "tranny" is used as an insult. I'm a bit agnostic on this one, as it's not a term that applies to me in either case (although i might fall within some definitions of the term "trans", i am cissexual and pass as cisgendered), but i am not certain whether, for instance, i should call out its usage when a male-assigned-at-birth genderqueer friend who falls somewhere between "transvestite" and "transsexual" on the transfeminine spectrum (he performs a female gender role without intending to pass, but uses male pronouns when not doing so) refers to his performing female gender as "going out trannying", or to "heterosexual trannies" (meaning heterosexual men who sometimes dress as women, rather than, as i would have assumed he meant, trans women who were exclusively sexually attracted to men).

I find myself agreeing with the commenter at Questioning Transphobia who says that "it has as much to do with misogyny and male dominance as transphobia"... but then i also find myself agreeing with another commenter who says "How the hell is it transmisogynistic for someone who was male assigned at birth, (I’m pretty sure still does, or at least has in the past) identifies as femme, usually uses female pronouns, and in general moves through the world as a woman, to use the word tranny?" - however, this one is clearly not my battle. With both "crip" and "retard", i'm not entirely sure whether it's my battle or not - "crip" is if it refers to all disabled people, but not if it only refers to physically impaired people, and "retard"... well, arguably includes me as a cognitively impaired person, but then, at school i was bullied and insulted for being "too clever", not the opposite, and as an adult have encountered terms like "nutter" and "psycho" used hurtfully far more often than "retard" (if i've ever been on the direct recieving end of the latter, which i'm actually not sure of).

I've seen this sort of thing happen with racial and ethnic insults too; apart from the reclamation of "nigger" in hip-hop culture (which has been discussed exhaustively all over the internet, although i'm too tired to find links now), the word "Paki" was used extensively by young people of Pakistani origin in the town i grew up in to refer to themselves and each other (the main ethnic group most of them actually were was Pashtuns, some of whom were from the Afghani rather than the Pakistani side of the border), but there was disagreement over whether non-Pakistani South Asians (such as Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis) were "allowed" to use the term, and its casual usage among Pakistani youth caused a lot of non-Pakistani young people to feel they could use it without that usage being racist... although in some cases it definitely was (for example, one white convert to Islam i knew who had no hesitations about using it disparagingly, saying for example things like "Pakis aren't proper Muslims").

(Actually, i will say one thing about "nigger": if i hadn't downloaded Saul Williams's most recent album "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust" when he made it available free for a limited time from his website, i would definitely have felt uncomfortable asking for it in a shop. Its title track itself plays on the discomfort white hip-hop fans have with the word "nigger", with its chorus "When I say Niggy, you say nothing" - the name is also a pun on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.)

Of course, i can't have a post about reclaiming words without mentioning "queer", which i think in some ways is both the most and least problematic of all reclaimed words, precisely due to its being by far the widest in scope (unless anyone can think of another?) - as someone recently said to me with reference to the trans/transgender/genderqueer debate, the problem with "queer" is that it is so wide in scope that it can mean almost anything that people want it to mean - and yet, despite the massively wide reclamation of "queer", to such an extent that many people have stopped seeing it as an offensive or even formerly-offensive term (and thus, perhaps, it's even lost the subversiveness and radical edge that it once had in terms of being deliberately chosen as a self-identifying term because of its offensiveness), i know people from some parts of the UK who, despite only being in their late 20s, find it strange that "queer" can be used as a "positive" term because they grew up hearing it used only as an insult. Anyway, extremely long books could be (and probably have been) written about "queer", and i still have some more specific posts planned on that word and how it relates to me, so i won't go into it any further here...

Like with my previous post about disability terminology, i don't have any answers here; i'd just like to throw it out to debate, largely because, while i've seen plenty of discussions about the appropriateness or otherwise of reclaiming particular words with regard to disability, gender identity, race/ethnicity and sexuality, i'm not sure if i've ever seen any attempts to put together a coherent analysis of reclaimed words across all dimensions of oppression (and i'm very aware that there are many i haven't even touched on here - words for sex workers, for example, or words for female genitalia used as insults, to pick two obvious categories... and i'm sure there are more).

A pattern i find particularly interesting that crops up repeatedly is the ambiguity of how widely words can be reclaimed - just where are the boundaries of the group allowed to do the reclaiming? - which seems to me to feed into much bigger questions about identity politics and whether it's unitive or divisive, the fluidity of identities and just how "self-defined" identities relate to those defined from outside or "above", etc - which is of particular interest to me with regard to my strong feeling that all people who are oppressed or discriminated against because of biological or cultural difference have common interests and parallel experiences, and have much to gain from allying with one another - yet at the same time, the identities of individual minority groups can be fiercely and jealously guarded, and there is a fuzzy and incredibly difficult (for me, anyway) to locate line between alliance, analogy and appropriation (I tend to have a vague and general discomfort with the idea of words that some people are "allowed to use", but others are not, which i think also needs to be somehow factored in here)... what do people think of this? Any and all responses welcome...