Undergraduate Finalist paper in the 2025 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Elizabeth McCabe, University of Oxford.
It is not often possible to hide whether one is a member of a marginalised group. If you are a woman, or a member of a particular race, it is obvious to the people you interact with on a daily basis. The opposite is true for most LGTBQ+ people[1]. Being queer is not a trait that can be worn on one’s sleeve, but must be actively proclaimed if others are to know. Queer culture and symbols uniquely fulfil this role. They enable the communication of queerness to a wide audience, which allows for community acquisition. Because of this unique expressive and communicative value, I argue that the misuse of queer culture is a type of illocutionary disabling, because it silences queer expression. This illocutionary disabling is wrong because it prevents expression and community formation.
First, I establish that queer culture and symbols are used as a form of communication that uniquely enables community acquisition. I aim to establish the normative significance of queer culture and expression. Then, I move on to show how the inappropriate use of queer culture makes the speech act of displaying queerness impossible. It does this via illocutionary disabling, because it dilutes the original meaning of these cultural displays. In the absence of alternative signals, this makes mutual communication of queerness impossible outside of explicit statements, constituting silencing.
I
Almost any other marginalised group will be guaranteed to knowingly interact with a significant number of members of the same group throughout their life. Most of these core traits are inherited, or learnt from people that are proximate. Race or colouring are inherited from biological family members. Religion is generally taken up from family, especially if it is a minority religion for that place. Women and girls have female family and friends, almost by necessity.
Queer culture enables widespread communication, which allows for the formation of community where it would not exist otherwise. It allows people to communicate queerness to other queer people specifically. I interpret queer culture to include most common mediums for cultural expression. Some of these are music, styles of dance and clothing. There are also broader elements from language, including ways of speaking and mannerisms.
These allow for communication of queerness to other people. By acting or dressing in certain ways, or using particular forms of expression, people can communicate queerness to others. Other people, especially queer people, can recognise these signals. This allows them to reciprocate, or to reach out explicitly. This can form the basis of new relationships, and can also inform people who are already related (like family members) of the shared trait.
One good example of this in popular culture is in the TV show ‘Sex Education’. Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa), a gay teenager, visits his mother’s family in Nigeria for a wedding, where sexual relations between members of the same sex are illegal. He ends up going to an underground party with Oba, the gay photographer, who identifies Eric as queer without ever asking or acknowledging his own queerness. As Oba says, “There are a lot of us here; we just have to speak quietly”. Cultural expression uniquely enables widespread communication, that can be interpreted by a proportion of other queer people but generally go unnoticed otherwise. In this way, perhaps unintentionally, Eric could signal across anyone at the wedding with limited actual risk.
The use of queer culture in this way is what Austin (1962) calls an ‘illocutionary act’. According to Austin, speech has an illocutionary function, as well as a locutionary and perlocutionary elements. The illocutionary act is the action that is constituted by an utterance, rather than its content or effect on others. Adopting queer symbols does not only mean expressing certain content, or making people believe certain facts. Adopting queer symbols or presenting using elements of queer culture constitutes communicating or expressing queerness. In the same way, at a traffic light party, it is understood that wearing a certain colour signals romantic or sexual availability. Here, wearing red would be an example of an illocution of a lack of availability.
It is also worth noting that the expression associated with using queer culture is not equivalent to a conversation in which someone says that they are queer. The expression can take two forms, both of which are different to direct verbal intercourse. In the first form, they can signal to a wide range of other queer people, while avoiding the attention of people who are not queer. In these cases, expression can replace direct communication when it is not possible. This is akin to the case of Eric in Nigeria. In the second form, they can signal to an open audience, and in doing so allow people to display or express core facts about their identity to the world at large.
Community of this sort can often only be formed by using the expression of queer culture.
The formation of a community with similar lived experience is very important for the wellbeing of people in marginalised groups. It provides the basis for a grounded and stable self-conception and identity. This is because we cannot fully understand ourselves or how we exist in the world independent of other people. To some extent, we must step outside our own subjective experience to try to grasp how we are perceived by others. This is particularly important for members of oppressed groups. In general, the messaging they receive is that core facts about their identity are wrong, or deformed, or worth being ashamed of. In order to re-evaluate what it means to be queer in such a context, people who share these characteristics are essential. It also provides an opportunity to express a formed self conception/identity, and access practical support. This might take the form of psychological support or resources.
II
The second part of my argument is that it follows from the unique expressive function that the misuse of queer culture is a form of illocutionary disabling. Certain uses dilute and distort the original meaning of cultural signals, rendering the act of expression using such signals akin to unspeakable. This is wrong because the act is crucial for personal expression and finding community.
In ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’ (1993), Rae Langton argues that one of the ways that pornography silences women is that it makes it impossible to make certain speech acts, like the refusal of sex. It makes it such that because of something about her means she cannot fulfil the conditions for a refusal, just like a person who has not been ordained cannot perform a Catholic marriage ceremony (p.302). There are similarities here to what I claim, that misusing queer culture can silence queer people via illocutionary disabling. It makes it impossible for queer people to express queerness.
The misuse has this effect when it contributes to changing the meaning of instances of expression. I focus on appropriation as misuse, which includes co-opting styles of presentation, art and mannerisms. If they are commonly used by non-queer people their meaning as a signal is diluted. There are also other familiar types of misrepresentation and distortion that would have a similar effect, like framing practices as perverted or subversive.
Misuse prevents their use for communication, because the signals cannot be reliably associated with queerness or vice versa. When culture is thus appropriated, queer people could make the same expression using the same symbols, but it would not be the same illocutionary act. That act is no longer possible for them.
This illocutionary disabling is slightly different to Langton’s case. For Langton, women cannot perform certain illocutionary acts because of their place in the context of sex, set by porn. Queer illocutionary disabling occurs because the meaning of the expressions themselves changes, rather than because of the place of the people. We can make another Catholic wedding ceremony comparison: the queer case is analogous to if the Catholic Church decreed that saying ‘I do’ did not constitute becoming married to someone, without replacing the utterance in the ceremony with another which did constitute becoming married.
In the case of queer cultural expression, the meaning of expression changes as it is used in other contexts. This is partly because of numbers: the more misuses, the higher the chance a particular use is not genuine. But it is also important to recognise that heteronormative socialisation is dominant, and those who conform to the current standards of heteronormative value typically have the social capital to define cultural meaning and social signalling. If attractive, affluent people adopt styles, the meaning behind those styles that they intend is more likely to dominate.
The idea that appropriation can dilute meaning is familiar. Consider the use of the word “pow-wow” in mainstream American culture to refer to any type of meeting, generally recognised as a case of offensive appropriation. It obscures the deep cultural and historical meaning of the word to Indigenous Americans, used in a modern context to refer to a cultural celebration and gathering including music (sometimes competitive) dancing (Browner, 2002, p.1). However, although the meaning of the term might have been diluted among other Americans, if one Indigenous American asked another “Would you like to come to a powwow with me?” the full meaning that they aim to convey would likely be transmitted. The reason for this is that both can recognise each other as Indigenous and set the context accordingly (and because the offensive use has begun to die out). However, if this were not the case, the meaning would be obscured, or at least require clarification.
Now turn to when queer signals are appropriated. This is different to the former example, because there is no way to display queerness ex ante. People do not have contextual awareness that a particular meaning is likely over another, this would require the communication they are trying to achieve. So, queer people can no longer make the same illocution, because the expression required to do so has been co-opted.
To draw out the unique elements of queer cultural expression I use a more fantastic example. Imagine a super-intelligent alien race who look exactly like humans are coming to Earth, but they have not arrived yet. So, humans come up with a signal to make sure we can identify each other: putting a hand on our head at the beginning of each conversation. Unfortunately, the aliens decide it looks like excellent fun, and adopt the practice. Although we can make the same signal, the action of signalling to other humans that I am human becomes impossible. It is another unspeakable act.
A potential objection to my argument emerges from this case. It might be pointed out that expression is not made unspeakable, because the signal is replaceable. The co-opted signal can no longer be used, but so long as it is possible to find another one it is still possible to communicate queerness. While this might be the case for the alien example, it underestimates the complexity of establishing cultural symbols and signals. Coordination to commonly decide or understand them is very difficult, especially in context where queer people are particularly marginalised or at risk. This is especially the case because of the variety of lived experience that these signals reflect. Claiming they can be replaced misses the fact that the expression is not just “I am queer”, but also connects people to a nuanced history and set of experiences. At the very least, there are non-negligible groups of people who would be left without commonly understood cultural signals. There is no easy way to move onto other cultural signals, so at best this objection presents a slight mitigation.
Therefore, the misuse of queer symbols is a form of illocutionary disabling. It distinctively wrongs the queer community because it makes the action of expressing queerness and ‘wearing it on your sleeve’ impossible. This is harmful because it prevents queer people from been seen in the world as they are, and because it prevents the formation of community.
Bibliography
Austin, J.L. (John L. (1975) How to do things with words. 2nd ed. Edited by J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisà. Oxford: Clarendon (The William James lectures How to do things with words).
Browner, T. (2002) “All about Theory, Method, and Pow-wows,” in Heartbeat of the People. United States: University of Illinois Press.
Langton, R. (1993) “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy & public affairs, 22(4), pp. 293–330.
Sex Education S3, Episode 6. (2021). Netflix, 17 September.
[1] Henceforth referred to using ‘queer’.