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    Regulating homophobic hate speech: back to basics about language and politics?

    Harvey, Andy (2012) Regulating homophobic hate speech: back to basics about language and politics? Sexualities 15 (2), pp. 1-16. ISSN 1363-4607.

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    Abstract

    Recently, there has been an explosion of legislation designed to curb ‘hate crime’ that has been introduced by the previous Labour Government after 1997. This paper takes the most recent instance of incitement to hatred on grounds of sexual orientation as its starting point. I discuss the legislation in the context of debates around free speech and artistic autonomy. Making use of post-stucturalist, psychoanalytic and discourse theories I argue that there are conceptual and practical difficulties attached to the regulation of hate speech if analysed through a politics of subversive repetition. I conclude that a better approach is to think about language as reciprocal communication and to develop a politics of sustained engagement with society that ultimately adopts a more voluntary approach to changing popular uses of language.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): homophobia, hate, language, queer, politics
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Andrew Harvey
    Date Deposited: 13 Dec 2012 11:11
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:01
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5880

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