Erica Bigelow

This paper offers a critique of nascent efforts to reclaim the r-slur— referred to throughout the manuscript as the r-word so as not to beg the question of its normative status—grounded in Linda Martín Alcoff’s groundbreaking ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’. In it, I argue that the question of the r-word’s reclamation fails to take into account the intra-community hierarchies that are reified when only some members of a slurred community—in this case, the community consisting of neurodi- vergent people and those with intellectual disability, as well as others targeted by the r-word—are able to participate in a slur’s reclamation. I begin by discussing slur reclamation more generally, before using Alcoff’s work, alongside the writings of Emmalon Davis and Olúfẹ́ mi O. Táíwò, to show why the reclamation of the r-word is fundamentally different than that of other slurs.