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In all seriousness, the zoomer queer language cop discourse is a product of a failure to understand subordination theory in its entirety. This isn’t their fault, because millennials have taken their discrimination theory backgrounds and applied it to more advanced concepts badly
Millennials, in the US at least, grew up with an education system that taught anti-discrimination as rhe basis of justice. This is the prevailing logic behind our civil rights laws.
Anti-discrimination has many weaknesses; at its foudnation, it is one that is completely contemperaneous. It concerns itself only with conditions in the moment, not conditions leading up to the moment.
But there are more advanced approaches. Anti-subordination is much closer to an approach that understands power dynamics. Anti-subordination affirms that we’re not yet at a place where equal treatment leads to equality.
Some modern theories are based in anti-subordination. Affirmative action is a roundabout way of approaching this. Concepts like intersectionality and appropriation only make sense in an anti-subordination lens.
What makes anti-subordination theory effective is that it accounts for past conditions and how they change, because it is only concerned with treatment with respect to differences in power. And it affirms that cultural histories result in a manifestation of power.
So when people say things like “queer is a slur” or “bisexuals can’t say faggot,” this is the effect of trying to take more advanced social justice concepts that require an anti-subordination lens and applying them as if they were fully contemperaneous anti-discriminiation ideas.
This approach leads to concepts like intersectionality becoming inverted from their intentions. Intersectionality wasn’t supposed to be about oppression olympics, but it’s become that.
In order to properly address why “queer” is a word used with pride, you have to understand its history as a slur. And you have to understand how reclaiming slurs is a way of denying the power of that word.
You also have to understand that reclaiming a word doesn’t fully disempower it, because those power imbalances haven’t gone away. All of this requires understanding these concepts as fluid, changing, living histories.
But when we try to just treat them as labels in the moment, using anti-discrimination logic, we actively sever those histories, and in doing so do harm.
In short, this discourse is about finding the limits of anti-discrimination as a concept, and its clumsiness and ultimate impracticality reveals how the need for more refined social justice concepts in law, education, policy, and discourse are sorely needed.
