Accounting for Offensive Speech as a Practice of Resistance

Abstract

Tasks such as toxicity detection, hate speech detection, and online harassment detection have been developed for identifying interactions involving offensive speech. In this work we articulate the need for a relational understanding of offensiveness to help distinguish denotative offensive speech from offensive speech serving as a mechanism through which marginalized communities resist oppressive social norms. Using examples from the queer community, we argue that evaluations of offensive speech must focus on the impacts of language use. We motivate this use of language in Cynic philosophy and use it to frame a use of offensive speech as a practice of resistance. We also explore the degree to which NLP systems may encounter limits to modeling relational context.