People are now using the term pede ('fag') to mark political opponents, liberal values, laws and institutions, the thesis from Aet Kuusik found.

In their doctoral thesis defended at the University of Tartu, Kuusik analyzed the use of five LGBT-related terms in the Estonian media, and how LGBT communities evaluate one of these — the term kväär — alongside its English equivalent queer and its Finnish counterpart, kvääri.

Prior to their doctoral studies, Kuusik had been working as an editor, and earlier on, in their master's thesis, they already dealt with vocabulary relating to LGBT topics. "I received my master's degree in 2014, and even then many questions arose for me which I had nowhere to find answers to. The vocabulary concerning LGBT topics was partly very new, and there was no one to discuss the choices with that had to be made when writing or editing a text," they described their path to the topic of their doctoral thesis.

Combining several methods, specifically corpus linguistics, critical stylistics, slur pragmatics, and community surveys, the dissertation offers the first systematic corpus-based analysis of LGBT-related terms in the Estonian media across three decades, and links it to community evaluations as well.

Kuusik argued that understandings of sexuality, identity and rights get largely shaped through language. "I was for a long time interested in how we talk about rights, how we label people, what that labeling brings with it, and what these words do in Estonian, but at first I couldn't see an outlet for myself in an academic context," they explained. This was largely because gender and sexuality topics are so little dealt with in the field of linguistics.

In 2022, however, Kuusik embarked on their doctoral studies, in order to delve deeper into these very topics. The main driver was a wish to understand the basis on which people make choices about which terms to use to refer to LGBT people, and on the other hand to understand how these vocabulary choices position LGBT people and LGBT topics in texts, and which societal norms are made visible through them.

How are LGBT people labeled?

In their doctoral thesis, Kuusik dealt with the question of which choices have been made and how those choices position people. In one avenue of research, they looked at how LGBT people have been labeled in the Estonian media since the 1990s, and in which linguistic frames these labels appear. They analyzed more closely the Estonian terms gei ('gay'), homo (colloquial, roughly 'homo'), homoseksuaal ('homosexual'), kväär (an Estonianised 'queer') and pede ('fag'). In a second line of research, they studied how Estonian and Finnish LGBT communities evaluate the terms kväär, kvääri and queer.

The doctoral thesis revealed that words referring to LGBT people can have very different histories of use, register and ideological meaning, and that even words that seem like synonyms have a different role in a text: gei, homo and homoseksuaal may alternate within a single text simply to avoid repetition of a word, yet in media discourse as a whole they are not equivalents.

"In critical language research, that is, a line of research which examines what meanings, evaluations and oppositions are created through language use, vocabulary choice is not treated as neutral, nor are words divided in themselves into good or bad. What matters is examining the context in which a term is used, what it is associated with, and which categories or oppositions are created through it. Through the use of terms and labels one can create visibility and belonging, but also draw boundaries between different groups," Kuusik explained.

Through their doctoral thesis, Kuusik examined how the use of LGBT-related labels and the frames associated with them have altered in Estonia from the 1990s to the present day. They compared two periods: 1995–2008, and 2014–2023. The data come from the Estonian National Corpus; the terms were searched across the entire corpus, regardless of what topic a text was concerning. This brought into the analysis texts in which LGBT topics are by no means the main subject, including sports news or political commentary. This made it possible to see how the labels function in everyday media coverage.

It became clear that over three decades the vocabulary related to LGBT topics has become markedly more diverse: Alongside older labels, for example LGBT, samasooline ('same-sex') and kväär have come in. The use of the word gei has increased, the use of homo has declined sharply, and the use of the word homoseksuaal has also somewhat faded. However: "Greater visibility does not, however, mean only normalization: these words may also be increasingly politicized," they said.

According to Kuusik, greater visibility can help bring minority rights into public debate. "For me it came as somewhat of a surprise how laws can be progressive, but in language use much remains hidden. Precisely in how LGBT people are seen and portrayed on an everyday basis," Kuusik remarked.

In the earlier period, homoseksuaal appeared repeatedly in lists where different groups were named through identity labels and placed into a shared risk category: the words narkomaan ('drug addict'), prostituut ('prostitute') and AIDS appeared in the immediate proximity to the term homoseksuaal so frequently that they are statistically significant co-occurring words (collocates) in the corpus.

A typical example is a sentence stating that blood donors must not include, among others, 'narkomaanid, prostituudid ja homoseksuaalid' ('drug addicts, prostitutes and homosexuals'), or a list naming drug addicts and homosexuals as AIDS risk groups.

Kuusik outlined that the problem lies not only in the fact that the word homoseksuaal is placed alongside the labels of other marginalized groups in such lists. The plural terms narkomaanid and prostituudid also turn an activity or a social situation into a permanent category of person. In this way people are presented as groups carrying a health risk, instead of describing which specific behavior or situation is considered a risk. The evaluation thus emerges from the interaction of vocabulary choice, categorization and the structure of the list.

The list as a device persisted into the later period too, but became more politicized: Of the more closely analyzed instances of the word homo, the list was the main textual device in a quarter of cases in the earlier period and in nearly a third in the later one. A different kind of list is typical: pagulased ('refugees'), moslemid ('Muslims'), immigrandid ('immigrants'), liberaalid ('liberals'), feministid ('feminists') and homod ('homos').

Kuusik explained that these terms are not in themselves negative, but placing them side by side can concentrate very disparate groups into a shared political frame of opposition, for instance in populist politics.

The logic of such a list persists even in texts critical of populism. In one ironic opinion piece there appeared a characteristic sentence fragment: "Vanamehed pruunides ülikondades, kes kütavad õhku kahe teemaga: pagulased ja homod" ('Old men in brown suits who stoke the air with two topics: refugees and homos'). In this sentence such political rhetoric is criticized, yet the words pagulased and homod still remain side by side as categories around which conflict is allegedly generated. In the later period, the association of the word homo with migration and ethnicity topics and with other politically opposed groups indeed grows stronger.

"Rarer are constructions in which a person belonging to a sexual minority appears themselves as an acting and self-defining subject. More often the talk is of groups as collective categories, or of what institutions permit, forbid or enable for them," Kuusik noted.

Another observation was that in the mainstream media the term gei dominated more clearly than in conservative-populist publications. In the latter, the share of the word homoseksuaal was considerably larger: in the analysis of the later period it made up 32 percent in conservative-populist sources, and 9 percent of the examined instances in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, gei remained, even in conservative-populist publications, the most frequent of the three labels compared (gei, homo and homoseksuaal).

Political labeling

The frequency of use of the slur pede has remained relatively stable over three decades, but its function has changed. Direct insult and the policing of masculinity persist, but in the later period political labeling becomes much more visible.

In the earlier time-frame, individual insult and the policing of masculinity were more central, while in media texts the slur also often appeared in quoted or ironic use. Approximately 80 percent of the earlier period's usage came in mediated form, as a quotation or a joke. In the later period the usage is more direct and aggressive, especially in online comments.

According to Kuusik, the term pede can have several functions in a text, while context is always highly significant. People may use the word to insult someone even when it is not known how that target person defines their sexuality, nor may it be relevant in the context. "The word can be a means of policing masculinity: Even long hair on a man can count as a deviation from masculinity, which is why he may be insulted with this term," they said

In the later material, alongside the labeling of appearance and behavior, the labeling of political stances and worldviews is also more clearly added. The label can also be applied to men whose views are considered too liberal — for example, supporters of feminism.

During the earlier period studied, such usages were rare and somewhat figurative; in the later one however this becomes systematic. A characteristic phrase is, for example, "feminiseeritud ja pedestatud" ('feminised and fag-ified'), with which liberal political space is depicted in one fell swoop as both unmanly and ideologically abhorrent. "Alongside individual insult, the term pede has also become a means of political stigmatization, with which boundaries are drawn between us and them," said Kuusik.

In the later period, the slur pede is associated, among other things, with opposition to liberal and European values. Such usage is characterized by expressions like pedepropaganda ('fag propaganda') and pedealdelikud väärakused ('fag-ish perversions'), where pede is appended to the name of ALDE, the European liberal party family, or by the sentence "Pedesid, mustlasi ja Brüsselit tuleb karta" ('Fags, gypsies and Brussels are to be feared'). In such usages, according to Kuusik, the word does not necessarily refer directly to sexuality, but is used to disparagingly label political values, institutions and opponents.

As the latter component of a compound word, the word can also appear as a "humorous" intensifier for enthusiasts of particular pursuits, such as train spotters or foodies, as in the terms rööpapede ('train fag'), autopede ('car fag') or toidupede ('food fag'). This does not necessarily render it a non-offensive term, however.

"My contention is that in seemingly non-sexual or humorous use, the word's earlier disparaging meaning potential does not disappear. With the word, an evaluative frame of deviation, excess or ridicule remains available," the academic noted.

Kuusik stressed different modes of conversation too. Kitchen table talk, media discourse and conversing with a stranger are all very different communicative situations, they noted, and the same term can function differently in each of them. "During my research I did not deal with the question of whether one word is suitable or another is forbidden, but with how these words appear in a text," they said.

Evaluating the terms

The second half of the doctoral thesis looks at how people in LGBT communities evaluate the labels. A survey conducted in October 2022 was answered by 353 people within seven days. Of them, 93 percent were aware of the word kväär, but only 35 percent used it, and the evaluations were spread across the whole scale, leaning somewhat towards the negative.

In the Estonian-language context, the evaluation was most clearly associated with gender identity: Non-binary respondents on average related to the word more positively, as did those under 30.

The comparison with the Finnish community, which Kuusik made together with Meri Lindeman, a researcher at Finland's University of Turku, demonstrated that the same international term has taken root differently in two closely related languages: In Estonia the localized form kväär is better known and more widely used than kvääri is in Finland, where respondents more often use the English queer.

In the open responses, broadly three attitudes appeared. Some respondents said they consider the word kväär a neutral or positive umbrella term encompassing very different gender and sexual identities. Others saw in it an empowering word of resistance: kväär sounds like väär (meaning 'wrong'), and it is precisely this that may represent the word's strength, as a label with which people who differ from the norm have been disparaged is reclaimed with pride as one's own – just as was done deliberately with the English word queer.

Back in the 1980s this term was still predominantly an insult. However, some respondents did not want to associate themselves with such a provocative shade of meaning. "For the community, the label is at once a means of meaning-making, strategy and risk management: a person may support the word but not use it, if it seems dangerous, or consider the word unsuitable but acknowledge its political potential," Kuusik said.

One conclusion to Kuusik's doctoral thesis is that language change does not consist in one so-called bad word being replaced by a good one. "Disparaging words do harm, and the impact of one's own language use is certainly worth analyzing. But respectful language use does not mean finding one magical term. Evaluations can also be expressed through which lists labels are placed in, which oppositions are created with them, what a text presupposes, or who is granted the right to permit or forbid something. So alongside the choice of label, it also matters whether the person denoted by that name is portrayed in the text as a person just like those who do not belong to a minority," Kuusik said.

According to Kuusik, in the very act of communicating, people are constantly having to make linguistic choices, mostly without consciously thinking them through. "We may not be aware of these choices every time, as we use language all the time, after all," they noted.

Aet Kuusik defended their doctoral thesis in linguistics "Naming, normativity and negotiation: LGBT-related labels in Estonian media discourse and community evaluation, 1995–2023" at the University of Tartu on August 31.

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