Beyond Double Standards: Analyzing “Slut” as Controlling Image, Protest Strategy, Threatening Specter, and Playful Label

• In Event: 222 - Student Forum Paper Session. Boundaries, Inequalities and Standards: Marriage, Race, Ethnicity, and Sex

Abstract

Terms like “slut,” “whore,” and other sexualized epithets historically have been used to denigrate women’s agency and police their sexual practices. In response, third wave feminist activists have attempted to reclaim “slut” with the Riot Grrrl and SlutWalk movements, which demand an end to “slut shaming,” the practice of disparaging women and girls for their sexual choices. Simultaneously, young women have begun to employ “slut” as both a term of endearment and as an insult for female peers. This paper examines contemporary definitions and usages of “slut,” as well as the effectiveness of feminists’ reappropriation of this and other sexualized insults. The paper draws upon Patricia Hill Collins’s (2008) controlling image, Mimi Schippers’s (2007) pariah femininities, and Judith Butler’s (2008) threatening specter to propose that “slut” is used in four distinct ways: (1) as a controlling image and “scarlet letter,” labeling individual women and girls as sexually promiscuous and deviant; (2) as a subversive protest strategy aimed to disrupt the sexual double standard and patriarchy; (3) as an everyday insult and “threatening specter” (Butler 2008; Pascoe 2012) that women employ in order to avoid becoming the object of slut shaming; and (4) as a seemingly harmless term of endearment used among young women’s friend groups. This framework fills a significant gap in the sexual reputations literature by emphasizing changes in the term’s meaning since the establishment of SlutWalk. It further provides a systematic examination of women’s usage of sexual insults and these terms’ effects on gender inequality and interpersonal relationships.

Author

• Kelly Marie Birch, Michigan State University