This paper examines two recent contributions to the hate speech literature – by Steven Heyman and Jeremy Waldron – which seek a justification for the legal restriction of hate speech in an account of the way that hate speech infringes against people’s dignity. These analyses look beyond the first-order hurts and disadvantages suffered by the immediate targets of hate speech, and consider the prospect of hate speech sustaining complex social structures whose wide-scale operations lower the social status of members of (...) targeted groups. In Heyman’s and Waldron’s accounts we find plausible insights into the nature of identity-based social hierarchies, and the harms that redound to subordinated people under the operations of such hierarchies. I argue, however, that both analyses are unsuccessful as justifications for the restriction of hate speech, because they do not ultimately provide reason to think that hate speech is responsible for creating or sustaining identity-based social hierarchies. (shrink)

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

The author uses an intersectionality framework to examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people evaluate the severity of their violent experiences. Previous research focusing on the severity of anti-LGBT violence has given relatively little attention to race, class, and gender as systems of power. In contrast, results from this study, based on 47 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, reveal that Black and Latino/latina respondents often perceived anti-queer violence as implying that they had negatively represented their racial communities, whereas white respondents typically (...) overlooked the racialized implications of their violent experiences. Furthermore, while lesbians of color emphasized their autonomy and self-sufficiency to challenge this discourse, Black and Latino gay men underscored their emotional and physical strength to undermine perceptions that they were weak for identifying as gay. Results also indicate that LGBT people experience forms of anti-queer violence in different ways depending on their social position, as Black lesbians faced discourse that neither white lesbians nor Black gay men were likely to confront. Thus, these findings suggest that topics primarily associated with homophobia should be examined through an intersectional lens. (shrink)

The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general (...) concept hate speech. And it does so using a range of well-known methods of conceptual analysis that are distinctive of analytic philosophy. One of its main aims is to explode the myth that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech. It also argues that hate speech is best conceived as a family resemblances concept. One important implication is that when looking at the full range of ways of combating hate speech, including but not limited to the use of criminal law, there is every reason to embrace an understanding of hate speech as a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena. Another is that it would be unsound to reject hate speech laws on the premise that they are effectively in the business of criminalising emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred. (shrink)