What is linguistic reclamation?

Sociologists, linguists and other scholars have explored the linguistic reclamation or re-appropriation as it pertains to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability, among others.

They record how these groups recast the terms with their own valuation (Rahman 2012; Brontsema 2004; Gaucher, Hunt and Sinclair 2015). Contemporary criticism has outlined a performative structure for reclamation comprised of: (1) Pejorative terms used to oppress or impose social control and/or to set or reinforce social norms (2) Different perspective on whether pejorative value is separable from the reappropriation. (3) Requires external interaction or response from to subvert oppressive social norms. Herbert explains that reclamation projects are made up of myriad individual speech acts in which the slur is deployed; in these acts the speaker intends for the slur to be either a neutral or positive descriptor. “New discursive conventions don’t simply spring into widespread usage; they need to be brought into being and propagated. The illocutionary act of reclamation is to constitute these new conventions and is an act of transgression against the existing social norms. In order to bring about these new discursive conventions, speakers must deploy the slur in contexts where the new conventions have not yet taken root. Typically, this means deploying the slur either in conversations with people outside the group seeking to reclaim the term or in contexts where these outsiders may hear, and give uptake to, the utterance."

Autism community activists make hashtags of diagnostic terms clinical terms to reinterpret self and societal perceptions about their behavior. They advocate use the public sphere to share, recast and reprioritize their personal sphere by sharing the social, personal, and lived ramifications of terms labelling neurological diseases (Habermas 1962 and 1989, May 2008). Hashtag activists serve their community by sharing their lived realities.