obligatory "i am on your side" disclaimer, but I feel like this is a really weak way of arguing whether or not something is a slur. a slur is a lot more than the first sentence of that definition would imply, and there is an entire philosophical debate amongst scholars about what exactly defines a slur (that is still somewhat unsettled; there is no one agreed upon definition in 100% certainty, even if everybody has mostly aligned about like 98% of what they agree makes a slur a slur. which is kinda just the norm for philosophy anyways but i digress)
i do think it's important to have some rigor here that is more than "this thing is an insult", because that then gets into the weeds that could justify statements such as "TERF is a slur", and i think we can all agree that we'd like to not die on that kinda hill.
if you notice me using a citation style unknown to mankind, mind your business. I'm not gonna pull up the citation manual rn lol
some suggested introductory resources:
"Pejorative Language". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/pejorati/
Bianca Cepollaro, "Slurs as the Shortcut of Discrimination". https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/2063
Adam M. Croom (2011), "Slurs". doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.11.005. [paywalled, but on scihub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.langsci.2010.11.005]
further readings & resources:
Adam M. Croom (2013), "How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words". https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.03.008. [paywalled, but on scihub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.03.008]
Justina Diaz-Legaspe (2019), "What is a slur?". https://r.jordan.im/download/language/diaz-legaspe2020.pdf
Chang Liu (2020), "Slurs as Illocutionary Force Indicators". https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00289-0 [but there's a free version here: https://philarchive.org/archive/LIUSAI]
Eleonora Orlando & Andrés Saab (2020), "Slurs, Stereotypes and Insults". https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00424-2. [paywalled, but on scihub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s12136-020-00424-2]
Mihaela Popa-Wyatt & Jeremy L. Wyatt (2017), "Slurs, roles and power". https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0986-2. [scihub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11098-017-0986-2]
controversial and/or challenge readings, if you're feeling spicy:
(stuff that has viewpoints I [and most of the people reading this, most likely] would partially or fully disagree with or potentially find offensive, but that I think present good examples of how to think critically in this area. also just stuff that may be uncomfortable beyond the more sterile, cold definitions of a textbook. any good academic course will provide you with a variety of opinions on the same subject, including ones that pretty much everyone in the class is likely to disagree with or even find offensive. being able to read such papers hones your ability to actually identify what it is you disagree with vs what things you think an author got right, as no author is going to be 100% wrong all of the time. it helps you build an ability to go "okay so your logic was good up until this point, where you made this and this error, resulting in your faulty conclusion" and "you got to the right conclusion, but you made several errors along the way, so maybe I should reconsider if your conclusion is actually correct or if I'm reading confirmation bias into it myself", among other similar skills and lessons in critical analysis. by providing these, I'm not condoning anything said in them. I just think they're useful examples. notice the ways certain sentences stir up emotions [or don't] and try to figure out why, and whether that's a you problem [i.e. the author isn't actually wrong, but you're having a reaction for some other reason] or a them problem [implicit bias, bigotry, dogwhistles, etc.]. see if you can predict what their next arguments might be, and then see if you were right or wrong and ask yourself why you were either right or wrong. were you right by pure guessing, or did you sense something in the word choice that revealed something about the author that they were either unaware of or were trying to hide their intentions? were you wrong because something caused some sort of a response that you incorrectly linked, based on a hasty assumption? or was it a totally justified assumption that was just wrong in this instance? why or why not?) (also like there's probably at least one paper in the other section where I'd disagree on a couple points made, but. hopefully you get what i mean lol)
Adam M. Croom (2015), "The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism". https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amper.2015.01.001 (putting this one in the challenge section because it's kinda jargon-heavy)
re: above - "Coreference and coindexing" https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2001/ling150/box-coreference.html you might also benefit from reading this page that has more info on coreferential expressions, in case it's too confusing on its own
debuk (2016), "What makes a word a slur?". https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/what-makes-a-word-a-slur/ (this one actually isn't that bad but it does lack context of power dynamics imho)
Leopold Hess (2020), "Practices of Slur Use". https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-09701006. [sci-hub: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1163/18756735-09701006]
Thaddeus Metz (2021), "Exactly why are slurs wrong?". https://revistas.um.es/daimon/article/view/476391/309741 (I just thought this one was interesting while I was looking through academic sources to collect them for this list)
Deborah Mühlebach (2023), "A non-ideal approach to slurs". https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10492735/
Renée Jorgensen Bolinger (2020), "Contested Slurs: Delimiting the Linguistic Community". https://sci-hub.ru/10.1163/18756735-09701003
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