SMµ÷½ĢĖł Boulder graduate student in linguistics applies painstaking analysis to alt-right, white-supremacist groups that popularized a clipped version of an antiquated word
In 2017, TV late-night host Stephen Colbert mocked then-White House advisor Steve Bannon for calling Jared Kushner, the former presidentās son-in-law, a ācuck.ā Colbert dubbed Bannonās shenanigans a TCM, or ātotal cuck move.ā
That joke might have drawn as much confusion as laughter, because the meaning of ācuckā can be hard to discern.
Maureen Kosse, a PhD student in linguistics at the SMµ÷½ĢĖł, has spent years studying the evolution of ācuckā in āalt-right,ā or far-right, white-supremacist movements. She contends that those who use the word ācuckā are telegraphing their belief that Jewish people seek to oppress and eliminate white people and that Black people want to overtake whites in a āwhite genocideā or a āgreat replacement.ā
Kosse argues that ācuckā and similar terms are ādisguised as innocuousā but are actually linguistic weapons employing misogynist and racist āhumorā in the alt-rightās efforts to radicalize others.
Kosseās analysis of the alt-rightās use of ācuckā appeared in the academic journalĢżGender and LanguageĢżlast summer under the title: āā.ā
As Kosse notes, ācuckā stems from the antiquated term ācuckold,ā a noun meaning a husband whose wife is unfaithful.Ģż
āCuckā became widely used after a 2014 controversy in which women working in the video-game industry were subject to a campaign of harassment, and a far-right media personality called one whistleblowerās husband a ācuck.ā
A screenshot from a slideshow explaining the meaning of terms used by the alt-right.
The epithet then proliferated in explicitly racist subreddit channels and took on the added implication of āwhite genocideā or a āgreat replacement,ā in which a āJewish cabal covertly encourages white women to have children with non-white men in order to eliminate the genetic purity of white men,ā Kosse writes.
That conspiracy theory has been cited in several terrorist manifestoes, including that of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter in 2019 and the Buffalo, New York, grocery-store mass-murderer, who targeted Black people.
āI argue that the link between ācuckā and white genocide comes from a crucial intertextual relationship that remains under-analyzed in the literature: the imagery provided by interracial cuck pornography,ā Kosse writes.
Using a sociocultural linguistic analysis that combines linguistic anthropology and construction grammar, she traces how a misogynistic meme evolved to take on racist meanings. She explains how āalt-right memes such as ācuckā spread covertly racist online discourse by cloaking medieval sexual logic and racial anger in misogynistic humor.ā
Additionally, she reports how cuckoldry evolved from its medieval origins to its āracialized appropriation in pornography,ā and analyzes data she collected from alt-right discussion groups since 2015 to show that constructions in which the term appears āconvey racist meanings by recalling the imagery of interracial cuck pornography.ā
An excerpt from a 2017Ģżop-ed in The Washington Post.
Additionally, she observes: āSuch constructions depend on a psychosexual metaphor that positions patriotism as protecting the nation from nonwhites and represents political capitulation as sexual shame.ā
Kosseās data comes from personal observations of several U.S. alt-right and far-right digital platforms, including Reddit (/r/altright and /r/Identitarian), Voat, 4chan, 8chan/8kun andĢżThe Daily Stormer.
In an October 2022 interview on a podcast called The Vocal Fries, Kosse noted that ācuckā was used in ways that required a linguistic āframe analysis.ā The term ācuckā has a complicated frame structure, because itās related to historical notions of ownership of women and consent, she told the podcasters.Ģż
As she studied the use of ācuck,ā she said, āI noticed it being used in ways that do not seem to be immediately related to the idea of a cuckold. I had trouble getting from A to B.ā
That was especially true when she saw the phrase, āTed Cruz cucks again,ā a sentence that prompted her to conclude that, āSomething really strange is going on here.ā
In that case, ācucksā is used as an intransitive verb, meaning that it has no object. (āI exist,ā has no object and is an intransitive construction, while āI dropped a ballā has an objectāballāand is transitive.)Ģż
Kosse also noticed other unusual formations, phrases like āfeminists cucking for Israel againā or ācucking for Muslims again.ā In those cases, ācuckingā was being used like āshilling.ā
As she told The Vocal Fries podcast, she noticed that whoever is doing the cucking or whoever is being cucked, āIt is happening because there is some outward force causing it to happen. Youāre doing this because someone else tells you. Youāre being humiliated, and you love it because youāre following what your overlords say.āĢż
She continued: āIn my data, I see it most frequently used against conservatives. Itās mostly a conservative-on-conservative insult for people like Ted Cruz, who are not considered sufficiently white supremacist enough for the alt-right faction.ā
An excerpt from a 2017 Washington Post op-ed.
In her article, Kosse cites several examples of intransitive use, including āTrump cucks in Israel,ā a usage that she identifies as coming from Holocaust deniers, and āTrump cucks on immigration, promises amnesty for illegal DACA invaders.ā In these cases, she notes, the verb ācuckā is followed by a preposition denoting an arena in which the subject behaves like a cuckold: āin Israelā or āon immigration.ā
āThis syntactic pattern is similar to other verbs of submission, e.g., to give up on something, which supports the argument that ācuckā is a syntactic blend,ā she writes.
In the case of āTed Cruz cucks againā and similar examples, Kosse employs a Construction Grammar framework to observe that when āpreviously transitive verbsā are used intransitively, readers must resolve āconflict between linguistic cues which do not ordinarily compete during interpretation.ā
Thus, she notes, āTed Cruz cucks againā implies that Cruz has chosen to ācuckĢżhimselfĢżby acting against his own best interests.ā
āAs revealed across the online data I collected, those ābest interestsā are what the alt-right perceives to be best for āwhite peopleāānamely, resistance to the cultural influence of a Jewish global elite whose support for social programs (e.g., immigration, welfare, feminism, taxation) is thought to undermine white European populations in the West,ā Kosse writes.
A 2017 Washington Post headline.
Additionally, she observes, those who participate in āalt-right and manosphere digital spaces may be more likely to infer a racialized reading to ācuckā given the preponderance of pornography and anti-Black racist discourse in their online spaces.ā
All of this can make it hard to discern what a person using the word ācuckā means by it. But this is not a drawback but a feature of far-right discourse, Kosse argues, noting that the ambiguity āaffords alt-righters a degree of plausible deniability as they circulate ācuckā into other domains.ā
While the meaning is ambiguous to many, Kosse argues that it is āparticularly legible to those the alt-right seeks to recruit: young, online, white men.ā
Maureen Kosse specializes in sociocultural linguistics, language and identity, language and power, conversation analysis, Old/Middle English andĢżFrench.
āMany people from across the political spectrum have casually adopted the word ācuck.ā There may be some awareness of the context around cuckoldry, cuck pornography or replacement theory in these usages, but we can also reasonably assume that many people do not know of the word's connotations within the alt-right,ā Kosse says, continuing:Ģż
āStill others have adopted the term ironically, or to weaponize the concept against alt righters. I would say that regardless of any knowledge or intention, all usages of ācuckā evoke racist and misogynistic frames of reference that are characteristic of alt-right discourses. In my opinion as a linguist, there is no way to appropriate expressions like ācuckā without also circulating an alt-right perspective of the world (one that has already had enormous real-world consequences, as numerous white nationalist mass-murderers have cited replacement theory in their manifestos).ā
Cay Leytham-Powell contributed reporting for this story.
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