ABSTRACT
This keyword is focused not generally on “language” but on hate speech, with an initial look at Econ dismissals of hate speech as not an actionable offense (“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me”). The scarlet thread running all through the keyword is readings of political dog whistles, illustrated through an anti-Semitic speech Donald Trump gave during the 2016 presidential campaign: Econs (and free online machine translation apps) totally miss the anti-Semitism, because it requires a more socio-politically nuanced interpretation of words than either is capable of; Masculine Humans can read the hateful implicatures of political dog whistles intellectually and believe that they are able to resist those whistles through their intellectual demystifications, but actually are quite susceptible (this would be the behavioral-economic discovery promoted by Tversky and Kahneman); Feminine Humans read political dog whistles through affective embodiment; and Queer Humans redeploy dog whistles playfully, both parodically and satirically, as in Randy Rainbow’s Trump satires based on song parodies. The keyword also explores thin and thick skin, Pierre Bourdieu’s “secret code,” Donald Davidson, Paul Grice, and Harold Garfinkel, Eve Sedgwick’s periperformativity, and José Esteban Muñoz’s counterperformativity as disidentification.
