We’ve unsheathed cunt, but who owns it now?

EdiThea Hallow sweeps another layer of blush across her perfectly pink, sparkly cheekbones.

“There is just something cunty, there is something gay, about women who are just not afraid to wear more, to do more.”

Thea is an emerging R&B singer from South London, a queer fashion icon, a contestant on the lesbian reality show I Kissed a Girl, and one of the many Gen Zers reclaiming the word “cunt” as a form of empowerment.

Perhaps startled, supportive, or in downright disbelief, anyone with any contact with younger generations will have heard the once-most-taboo word in the English language slipping into the vernacular.

Until recently, cunt was widely considered a misogynistic slur, particularly damning in the United States, and an outlaw in the OED until the 1970s.

Now, young people are celebrating cunt. They are letting it roll off the tongue in an unabashed approbation of things camp and audacious. Skinny sunglasses or a sleek bob can be cunty. For transgender supermodel Alex Consani, her “full-time job” is “serving cunt”.

But cunt is not only divisive in its contemporary reception (don’t scream it around your boss); the plurality of its history suggests why its reclamation may be contested.

For sex historian Kate Lister, reclaiming the word cunt is a feminist act. It is the socially accepted “vagina” that has the real misogynistic etymology, derived from the Latin for a sword’s “scabbard” or “sheath”.

Cunt, however? While its etymology is debated, linguistic theories trace it to the “gwen”, “gene”, and “cun” sounds, from which we got womanhood, creation, and wisdom.

Vagina gave us scabbard. “Gwen” gave us queen. Enough said.

Contrary to its violent potential, one of the joys of language is its very fluidity, which allows for a restoration of agency to the oppressed. A striking example is award-winning writer Alice Birch’s play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (2014).

“My Vagina is an Organ, my Vagina is not a Gap [...] I’m pushing back [...] I’m Surrounding you.”

Through inverting the spatiality and linguistics of sex, Birch inverses the very contract of male domination. In a similar way, Gen Z are undertaking an evagination of cunt.

In its complementary form, however, cunt dates to the Black and Latino gay ballroom scene in 1980s New York, where “giving cunt” was an accolade of giving femininity. The term spread to the wider gay community and was further popularised in the 2010s by the infamous drag queen RuPaul, with his euphemistic catchphrase “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent”. 

With this in mind, we have to ask ourselves who gets to perform the value reversal of cunt. Should the straight artist Marilyn Minter have tweeted “Our Cunt-ry Needs You!” in 2022 as a call against the overturning of Roe v. Wade? Is it right for it to be associated with Charli XCX’s Brat culture, or to be Olivia Colman’s favourite swear word?

In other words, is cunt for the girls or for the gays? It is both.

Vibrant performances of femininity and gayness are not to be conflated, but Thea Hallow’s comment ties together a rejection of stifled gender identity through an association with the “woman”.

After all, gay homophobia is inherently misogynistic, in its fear and exclusion of “female” qualities. Through reclaiming the word cunt, the queen (of any gender) asserts power across both female and queer communities, enacting unruly performances of autonomy and identity beyond Western patriarchal confines.

Not only does the sheath expel the sword, but the sword abandons its hardened identity. 

When women are empowered through language, masculine archetypes are simultaneously disordered, making space for queer recognition.

For some, however, cunt has experienced a “context collapse”. Catalysed by social media, its usage has divagated far from the original subculture for which it enacted a defiance of marginalisation.

Cunt has been gobbled up and regurgitated into a Gen Z vocabularic vogue of plain coolness. This is where the real issue arises. If linguistic history teaches us anything, it is that the sheer audacity of cunt has granted visibility to those who dared to claim it. Time will only tell if it becomes gurgled up into the bland backwash of pop-culture slang.