I'm trans and I really don't want to federated with these people if their mods are defending the -tard suffix and they aren't getting de-modded and banned. I also don't want to be federated with them if they ban critiquing western chauvinism.
Someone who is an admin and with more of a level head than me RN please talk to their admins about it.
My question here is:
How are these terms being reclaimed?
If we looked at the reclamation of the word "queer", we have a perfect example. Queer used to mean bad, perverted, unacceptable, and too feminine/too masculine for the hegemonic gender norms etc. It still gets used as a slur in this sort of way, although much less frequently.
Nowadays, queer has been reclaimed as a term that is used as a positive description and it's used with pride to define individuals by their sexual and/or gender identities and to foster solidarity.
With that in context, how are these so-called "reclaimers" of the R-slur reclaiming this term?
When someone like Keffals (🤢🤮) uses the word or a portmanteau of -tard, is she using this term to create solidarity and as a term of pride?
Or is she using it to regurgitate the current discourse which uses the term to perpetuate stereotypes, as a way to use the term to denigrate and dehumanize, in just the way that the R-slur became a slur in the first place when it was originally taken from medical discourse and brought into mainstream slang usage?
If it the latter case, and it is in Keffals' case, then there is no reclamation of the term taking place and the person doing it is misusing the term "reclamation" as a rhetorical shield to hide behind, like the intellectual coward they are, by draping their bigotry in some self-aggrandizing notion of activism while they are simply perpetuating the prevailing hateful discourse of the term's usage.
Your friends may be using it differently however and I can't say because I'm not privy to the context in which they are using those terms, although I'm extremely skeptical about people who do not have intellectual disability using the R-slur and claiming that it's used in a reclamatory fashion. That's a bit like myself, being a white person, and having had people use the N-word against me (rarely, but still...) and then deciding that it's my prerogative to reclaim the term since I've been on the receiving end of it being used as a slur against me; it's not my term to reclaim.
So I'd need a pretty damn good justification for why a person without intellectual disability is reclaiming the R-slur and tbh I haven't come across it yet.
these are exactly my feelings about femboys trying to reclaim trap. it's a slur denigrating trans women - you don't get to make the call that it's a positive term applied to you that means exactly the thing it was used to brutalize us with.